Redesign of a Bitumen Trailer
ViVA helped a transport company determine human-centred approaches and critical hazard exposures to inform the re-design of their bitumen trailer.
PROJECT LEAD
PROJECT TEAM
PARTNERED WITH
Speedie Contractors, Holmwood Manufacturing Group
Context
Transport of bituminous products exposes workers to significant hazards because it involves transport of hazardous goods at elevated temperatures (up to 2000C), with irritating emulsifiers, and toxic fumes and vapours. Additionally, the bitumen, in certain cases, can be explosive. Bitumen exposures, in hot or molten state, can cause fatality, thermal burns, respiratory tract or eye irritation, and significant skin irritations.
Challenge
The redesign of a bituminous trailer to reduce fatal hazard exposures, improve safe operations, and increase work efficiencies.
Approach
The human factors team partnered with operations to enhance the engineering design strategy through specialised task analysis, risk assessment, fatal hazard, and consequence analysis. They applied tools and techniques from the mining industry to this project, appreciating work hazards from the view of operations and maintenance.
Outcomes
The re-design of a heat-in-transit system that changed on-site liquid petroleum gas methods of heating bituminous products to an electric rod heat-in-transit system, altering regulation standards to include this method in the transit of dangerous goods. Additionally, the solutions reduced on-road drive and heating time, fatigue hazards, heat retention, and worker exposures to hose lines and valves since the design team instituted complementary strategies to address operational and maintenance activities. This project won an award in the Australian Good Design Awards engineering category.