Ergonomic Impact of Fastening Operation (Preprint)

摘要

Fastener installation is a major operation on the assembly shop floor of manufacturing industries. The operator often performs fastening operations at awkward postures depending upon the workplace layout and assembly requirement. These factors combined with the forces involved in the fastening operation put the operator at risk of ergonomics related injuries. In order to design safer workplaces and tools it is necessary to identify the causes of injuries by quantifying the risk factors involved. To quantify the effect of dynamic force, a single-degree-of-freedom dynamic system model is developed to understand the dynamic characteristics of the hand-arm, which is measured using a fixtured experimental setup. Subjects in the experiments were asked to perform fastening operations at different postures using two types of tools: pistol-grip tools and inline tools. The measured data was used to develop a hand-arm dynamic model, which can predict the angular objective measure to assess the dynamic effect of fastening operation with different tools at different postures.