FINALIST - Safer Maintenance
At the Imerys Aluminates plant at West Thurrock, they had struggled with manual handling while replacing ball track mill plates inside cement ball mills on site. 100s of plates weighing 55kgs each have to be lifted and replaced twice each year in each of our 2 mills.
There is limited space inside the mill and restricted access to get machinery inside the mill to automate the process with a diameter of just 2.6m and an inlet entrance of approx. just 750mm and two small manhole type hatches on top.
This is a high risk manual handling task with risk of hand injuries why placing the plates, which due to the small size of the mill plates and limited working area, which reduced the opportunity to limit the risk by sharing manual handling with multiple people.
Watch the video to see the solution to this problem.