Mobile Workstation Redesign
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Date
2015-12-07
Authors
Lagassé, Patrick
Lopushansky, Garrett
Struc, Michael
Zhang, Jinhui
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Abstract
The City of Winnipeg Water and Waste: Water Services Division requires new mobile workstations for hydrant repair. The current vehicles are approaching the end of their service life and have experienced damage for which the division cannot economically justify the repair or replacement. The Mercedes 2015 Sprinter “3500 Cargo, V6 170 Extended, Super High Roof GVWR, 5000 kg” has already been selected by the division as a replacement model and a design for a new workstation is required for the interior of this new vehicle. After having determined the client’s needs, our team has designed a feasible workstation within the Sprinter van for hydrant repair. The primary features of the final design include a ten-foot workbench on which the workers can perform hydrant repair, a partitioned area on the workbench to be used as an office space, an enclosed area utilizing the Sprinter’s sliding door to store exterior equipment, a shelving unit to store general equipment and spare parts, allocated space for storage of hydrants during transportation, a subfloor under which hydrant keys will be stored, and a lifting device to assist workers in moving hydrants in and out of the workstation. The critical needs that are met by the design are utilizing commercially available components, improving worker safety and overall workstation ergonomics. Our team has selected as many components as possible from the market, most of which are manufactured by Ranger Design, a company that specializes in Sprinter equipment. Worker safety is improved through incorporating a hydraulic lift on the rear of the van. The overall layout of the workstation optimally configures the components to improve workstation ergonomics. Our team has confirmed the feasibility of the design by modeling the workstation using SolidWorks CAD software. The final mass of the design is 840 kg, well below the vehicle capacity of 2238 kg. The total cost per workstation is $32,535.82 (CND).