Iris Pit Platform

Challenge: One of our customers in the Power/Energy Industry wanted to improve on the health and safety elements of their turbine assembly pit. Their previous process, where operators were leaning over the pit to work on turbines, proved to be ergonomically difficult and there was a desire to improve on both the health and the safety facets of the process. 

Solution: We designed and built an adjustable iris opening platform to reduce the gap between turbine and the work platform and to increase the ergonomic ease of assembly tasks by reducing reaching over the gap. The platform is designed with a circular opening that opens and closes to accommodate vertically assembled turbines in the pit. The platform allows an operator to walk on the top floor surface up to the edge of the opening by reducing the gap between the floor and the equipment to ~1 inch as opposed to the former, wider gaps. The opening is motorized and is manually controlled by an operator.

The iris opening can be adjusted to open from 36" diameter through 103" diameter and takes roughly 60 seconds to open/close.