Sustainable Design of Machine Guards

Promoting sustainable industrialization by fostering safety of machinery is a fundamental and ethical approach. Working in safe conditions is essential to comply with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and, in particular, with SDG3 and SDG8, therefore making machines safer during their operation becomes a basic aim for a more sustainable society. From this perspective, the influence of certain design or/and physical parameters on machine safety must be necessarily analyzed even if standards do not consider them, with obvious advantages also in terms of industrial innovation, complying with SDG9. The present work refers to the study of machine protection panels to characterize their ability to resist ballistic penetration. In ISO 14120-Annex B, the methodologies and standards for the design and validation of machine guards are described, but the influence of many characteristics and parameters has not been considered to characterize the protection performance. This paper presents some results in the terms of withstanding capacity of polycarbonate panels to ballistic penetration considering the size of the guards and their ageing condition due to solar radiation. The analyses for the inspection of the through-hole cracks and deformation of the panels have been performed with an innovative method by using a metrology grade 3D optical scanner and 3D inspection techniques.