Degradação dos cintos de segurança contra quedas após uso por ramo de atividade

Abstract

Full body harnesses ares used as a protective equipment in order to minimize the consequences of high falls and require good mechanical properties to provide the necessary protection to the user. There are few studies about the characterization of used full body harnesses in order to identify and quantify the loss of degradation after its usage time. Previous studies showed those protective equipment lose their protective properties during service life, caused by several destructive factors as well as UV, dust, chemicals, temperature changes and humidity, as the direct contact with sharp objects and rough surfaces. The objective of this work is to present degradations found in full body harnesses after use, relating these defects to the types of activity to which they were exposed. The methodology used is based on the use of full body harnesses samples againdt falls used by workers in several companies, performing visual inspection, caracterization of textile materials, static and dynamic tests on said samples. The results confirm several types of degradation found in previous research and demonstrate that most of the defects found are related to corrosion of metallic elements (90 %), dirt (50 %) and wear on the tapes (20 %). In those samples collected in textile industry, a greater diversity of defects and dirt were found, while in civil construction only dirts from cement was found. In the energy and telecommunications sectors, defects were found in dorsal support elements and in the legs, in addition to wear on the tapes in 80 % of the samples, which may be related to the daily frequency of use of Personal Protective Equipments to climb stairs and poles. Finally, all used full body harnesses against falls studied were approved in dynamic tests, but there were a loss of resistance of 3.46 %, proven through static resistance test.