Design and evaluation of ergonomic grip handle for manual carrying of long metal bar

Liew, Jee Seng (2021) Design and evaluation of ergonomic grip handle for manual carrying of long metal bar. Project Report. Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Manual materials handling (MMH) activities are typically performed by workers in various industries such as construction, manufacturing, agricultural, and automotive. Usually, MMH associated with transferring of long metal bar will be carried out manually by two workers due to relative low labour cost. If the demand for metal bar is high, worker might be suffered from the Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorder due to repetitive transferring process. In worst case scenario, long metal bar may be wobble and swing during the carrying process. Hence, it may lead to unstable motion on the metal bar while transferring process and affect the hand grip strength of workers. The objectives of this study were to identify the design requirements and user’s requirements of an ergonomic grip handle for manual carrying long metal bar, design an ergonomic grip handle based on the design requirements and user’s requirements as well as to fabricate and evaluate the performance of the grip handle prototype in manual carrying of long metal bar. There were 50 participants involved in anthropometric data measurement for designing the grip handle. A questionnaire survey was performed to determine users’ requirements. Subsequently, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was applied to analyze the correlation between users’ requirements and engineering specification of the grip handle. Few sketches were created based on the result obtained from the QFD. Pugh Conceptual Selection was developed to choose the best design. The best selected conceptual design was converted into engineering drawing and a prototype was fabricated. The System Usability Scale was applied to evaluate the usability of the prototype. The result on usability testing is 77.08 out of 100 which defined the prototype as “Good”. Additionally, carrying analysis was simulated by using CATIA software, the results of carrying a long metal bar using bare hand versus using the prototype are 231.831 N and 283.718 N, respectively. Hence, carrying long metal bar with the ergonomic grip handle will not exceed the standard of hand vertical distance. Therefore, this study concluded that the grip handle prototype was able to assist users or workers to perform manual carrying of long metal bar that fulfil to ergonomics requirements.

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