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CÚCUTA
MECANICA ANALITICA
ING. ELECTROMECANICA
UNIVERSIDAD FRANCISCO DE PAULA SANTANDER
2019
14. Danger around the corner
At a seven storey building a face lift was installed for cleaning and for service
purposes (Fig. 15). The latter were necessary because the corrosion resistant steel
unfortunately did corrode and had to be repaired by coating with enamel varnish.
After a couple of years the lift had been refurbished and redesigned to enable it to
work on both the smaller and the wider edges of the building without having to take
off the lift cage. For this purpose the rails on the flat roof were laid around the corners
and the carriage of the lift with the counter-weights which had been rigid until then
was made flexible by two hinges to allow travel around the corners. One year after
the redesign the lift dropped while the cage was occupied by three workers.
Fortunately the drop was intercepted by the overhead contact wires of the tram on
the road in front of the building. So the workers suffered only minor injures. The
upper part of the carriage which had broken off the rest did not drop because it
fortunately jammed at the edge of the flat roof. Fig. 14. Baggage strap and hook. R.
Kieselbach / Engineering Failure Analysis 11 (2004) 501–513 511 The visual
inspection of the parts revealed that the manoeuverability of the carriage had been
achieved by exchanging the older rigid connection between ‘‘gallows’’ and carriage
by two pivots. These consisted of a bearing housing welded to the carriage and a
trunnion attached to the gallows. This connection was designed so that the trunnion
was pressed into a drill hole of the section and secured by a fillet weld. These welds
were broken. A reassessment of the design of the welds showed that the safety
factors were grossly insufficient. When the lift was moved around a corner of the
building the connection F had to be opened so that rotation around R was possible.
Perhaps at some time or other the connection F had not been fastened again after
moving the lift, so that the bearing at R had to withstand a bending moment not
foreseen by the designer – if there had been a designer at all, which it was not
possible to ascertain because the manufacturing company of the lift had gone
bankrupt in the meantime.
14.Peligro a la vuelta de la esquina