Dust-reduced electric power tools for the construction industry

Status:

completed 08/2005

Aims:

In many sectors of the industry hand-operated machinery and equipment is used for working on mineral materials such as concrete or lime sandstone. These activities may involve the release of mineral dusts. Employees are sometimes exposed to high levels of dust. However, process systems (machine and mobile dust collector) that reduce the emissions of dusts have been on the market for a long time. Nevertheless, their real effectiveness is not yet fully recognised in practice; authoritative information is urgently required.

Activities/Methods:

To clarify the question as to how effective the processing systems currently available on the market are in collecting dust, a joint, practice-orientated research project supported by the HVBG was implemented (ZVEI and Berufsgenossenschaften). Around 100 commercially available processing systems were investigated. All the systems were assigned to different “machine categories”, such as abrasive cutters, masonry slot cutters, eccentric grinders or plaster milling machines. Within each group the same criteria were used for investigating each system. The processing systems were tested under practical conditions in a specially arranged test room.

Results:

Investigations in the test room showed that, for many machine categories, significantly lower dust emissions are achievable in practice than are currently observed. There were no instances of concentrations from matched systems even approaching the high levels observed from workplace measurements on sites using non-matched or non-extracted systems. As a result of the research project, information on the processing systems that were investigated is now available as an aid to risk assessment. This information is freely available on the Internet (www.gisbau.de ()).

Publications:

FP241 Final report

Last Update: