Reducing occupational fatalities by using NIOSH 3rd generation automatically deployable rollover protective structure

摘要

Each year tractor rollovers cause injuries or deaths for farmers despite the fact that an effective safeguard was available in the form of a rollover protective structure (ROPS); however, many ROPS were removed by the tractor's owners, because the ROPS is too tall to allow tractors to enter farm fields because it may damage produce located on low hanging tree branches while working in an orchard, and the loss of crops means loss of money for farmers. The NIOSH AutoROPS will provide the same level of protection as the conventional ROPS, but instead of having the post as one solid part as with the ROPS, the AutoROPS has a fixed posts located inside the outside deployable posts to meet the farmer's need of low clearance. This study addressed the need to build and test the NIOSH 3rd generation of the AutoROPS model based on Alkhaledi et al. (2002) model, which was smaller in size with low overhead clearance zone and to insure that the built model would comply with the SAE J2194 standard for static testing. The results showed that the 3rd generation AutoROPS absorbed all applied loads in sequence, thus satisfying the SAE J2194 standard requirements. No signs of failure were shown for the AutoROPS' base and the latching mechanisms. The successful testing the NIOSH designed AutoROPS lead to the development of the ANSI/ASABE S599 industry standard, which was approved November 2010 as an American national standard for standardized deployment performance of an automatically deployable ROPS for turf & landscape equipment.