This Technical Report gives guidelines for estimating, assessing and documenting the daily vibration exposure due to the use of hand-held power tools and hand-guided machines, according to the requirements of the European Physical Agents Directive (vibration) 2002/44/EC. This Technical Report is addressed to competent services for the assessment of vibration exposure at the workplace and to national authorities and industrial organizations. It helps to establish documentation for specific machinery or work situations and can also be useful for employers.
It follows the method of EN ISO 5349-1 and EN ISO 5349-2 but instead of measuring the vibration magnitudes at the specific workplaces, the methods in this Technical Report use existing vibration values from other sources of information including those provided by the manufacturers of the machinery according to the requirements of the Machinery Directive 98/37/EC. It is important that the vibration values used in the exposure assessment are representative of those in the specific use of the machinery. Workplace measurements, however, are required if suitable data are not available to represent the vibration under the specific working conditions or if the calculation results do not help to decide whether or not the vibration exposure limit value or exposure action value is likely to be exceeded.
This Technical Report gives guidance on how to estimate the exposure duration and the daily vibration exposure A(8) as defined in EN ISO 5349-1. It also offers a simple method for estimating the daily vibration exposure by means of a table which indicates the vibration exposure as a function of the equivalent vibration total value and the associated exposure duration. Both methods can be used even in cases of multiple exposures on the same day.
Annex A gives guidance for manufacturers and suppliers of machinery concerning information that warns of risks from vibration, which should be reported to the customer.