Aluminum Enclosures: It’s All About Safety

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong in an industrial or laboratory environment. And even after you have exhausted every conceivable manifestation of Murphy’s Law within those environments, there will be many “accidents-waiting-to-happen” that you’re bound to miss. And that’s where Framing Tech’s aluminum enclosures come in to save the day. By definition, they are guards. As such, they are expressly designed to guard against those unpredictable Murphy’s Law-types of events.

To be fair, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), in their 1917.151 section of standards, does a fairly thorough job of defining those events and the way different “guarding” mechanisms can prevent them. They define guarded to mean “shielded, fenced, or enclosed by covers, casings, shields, troughs, spillways or railings, or guarded by position or location.”

The examples of guarding methods OSHA gives include:

• guarding by location (positioning hazards so they are inaccessible to employees); and
• point of operation guarding (using barrier guards, two-hand tripping devices, electronic safety devices, or other such devices)

Put another way, guarding structures in an industrial or lab environment can do one of two things: they can either keep something hazardous within the enclosure from coming out, or prevent something hazardous outside the enclosure from getting in.

What Needs to Be Guarded?

Where to begin? There are many types of hazards, and many types of guarding mechanisms. For the sake of simplicity, however, we’ll focus mainly on potential hazards for which aluminum enclosures are ideally suited.

Let’s start with the easy ones. First and foremost, machines, equipment, and processes with a wide hazard radius should be guarded inside an enclosure.

On the other hand, where the equipment or process itself is exceptionally large, it is more practical to keep them outside the enclosure and protect the operator inside.

In cases where machinery can move while being operated, it should be properly secured to prevent shifting. Some of our aluminum enclosures feature special panels and attachments to help prevent shifting.

In essence, wherever a worker can easily reach around, over, under, or through a guard or enclosure and potentially suffer serious injury, OSHA does not consider the machine or process to be properly guarded.

The Practical Advantages of Aluminum Enclosures

Because the structure is made primarily with aluminum, Framing Tech’s enclosures are strong, light, and corrosion-resistant. And because they are built out of precisely measured extruded aluminum profiles, the fabrications are easy to assemble. If you need to change the layout of the structure down the road, you can re-use the components in a different configuration.

Whether you are looking for a quick pop-up room that can easily be integrated into an office, manufacturing, or commercial environment; a large or small enclosed space for product testing, server rooms, or modular offices; a UV-resistant curing station; a standalone workstation; a tabletop enclosure for pharmaceutical applications; or countless other types of fabrications, our selection of aluminum enclosures is bound to meet your needs.