At the end of 2008, the CEN (Comité Européen de Normalisation – European Committee for Standardization) approved the standard EN-15635 “Steel static storage systems – Application and maintenance of storage equipment”. It was classified under the ICS (International Classification for Standards) code number 55.200. The standard came into effect in 2009. Work is currently being finalized on its full translation into Polish.
As the name suggests, it describes the technical conditions for the application and maintenance of steel static storage structures, or in common parlance, steel warehouse racking. Until its publication by CEN, it was difficult to indicate criteria for the safe use of racking in Poland, as the existing standard described design and assembly requirements, not operational ones. And proper assembly and acceptance of racking – as I wrote in “Logistyka” No. 4/2008 – is only the first deal in the game called “operating a high-bay warehouse”.
As all users know, we can look at a high-bay warehouse nicely and calmly just after the installation is accepted; afterwards, it may only look less nice, as long as it does not become less calm or even dangerous. It was precisely to define the area of our peace of mind and methods for expanding it that the EN-15635:2009 standard was created. The technical standard in section 9.5, Principles of measurement and classification of upright and bracing damage, describes the rules of our three-card monte, and we present the algorithm reflecting this, along with data from all three cards, within the article.
The starting position is the occurrence of damage described in the standard, causing permanent deformation of the entire element, in accordance with Figure 14 of the standard (we are deliberately not providing the figure; if you have steel pallet racking as warehouse equipment, it is simply worth investing in the standard). Over a measuring length of one meter, the limit values are as follows:
– 3 mm for the upright when viewed from the front of the rack frame,
– 5 mm for the upright when viewed from the side of the rack frame,
– 10 mm for the bracing.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 4/2010.