'Game-changing' Workwear to be Introduced in Arctic in April

'Game-changing' Workwear to be Introduced in Arctic in April
Wenaas Workwear, in collaboration with Norwegian research institution SINTEF, will launch a new generation of 'game-changing' workwear in April.

Wenaas Workwear, in collaboration with Norwegian research institution SINTEF, has revealed that it will launch a new generation of “game-changing” workwear in April, which will increase the recommended outdoors time of workers in the Arctic by 100 percent.

“Today, oil and gas workers in the Barents Sea are wearing traditional cotton coveralls which are unsuited to temperatures below 0 degrees Celsius,” Baard Tosterud, marketing director of Wenaas Workwear, said.

“The strict security requirements for offshore clothing limit options in this respect; the outer layer must be flame retardant and antistatic, as well as adaptable to hearing protection and communication devices. In the Arctic Circle, the extreme weather comes in as an extra challenge,” Tosterud said.

In order to create Wenaas’ new workwear range, researchers at SINTEF’s headquarters in Trondheim monitored a variety of simulated offshore tasks in a laboratory where temperatures were set to 25 degrees below zero.

“Among the major challenges within this project were several conflicting demands; of course you have the extreme temperature, winds and density of the Arctic to consider, but also the strict security requirements combined with multiple user tasks,” Ole-Petter Næsgaard, industrial designer and project manager at SINTEF, said.

“The new clothing range has received excellent feedback from offshore workers in situ. It offers the correct level of thermal protection, good dexterity and provides solutions for easy individual adjustments. Laboratory results indicate it allows for double the currently-recommended outdoors time in the Arctic,” he added.



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