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New machines - the European Machinery Directive
From 29 December 2009 the European Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC supersedes the actual Machinery Directive 98/37/EC. One of the main changes associated with this fact, affects directly the standards available for the design of the safety related control systems.
Asafety attitude around the machine life cycle
The new functional safety standards are intended to encourage designers to focus more on the functions that are necessary to reduce each individual risk, and what performance is required for each, rather than simply relying on particular components.
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Functional safety
As the actual standard EN 954-1 is not longer enough for modern controls based on new technologies, the new functional safety standards EN ISO 13849-1 and EN IEC 62061 are going to improve it. These standards take into account the reliability of the safety circuit components and its ability to detect/ diagnose faults and reject common cause failure. The performance of each safety function will be specified as Performance Level (PL a, b, c, d, or e) or Safety Integrity Level (SIL 1, 2, or 3) on each case. This means there is a probabilistic element in compliance that must be quantified and machine builders must be able to determine these levels on their safety machine functions.
Helping you to reach easily the right safety machine level required
In order to assist you on the evaluation of your safety machine applications, a free software tool utility named ‘SISTEMA’ made by the German Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BGIA) has been developed. This tool enables you to model the structure of the safety related control components based upon the designated architectures, thereby permitting automated calculation of the performance level from each safety machine function required.
> Click here to link with the « SISTEMA assistant-software » |
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These safety related control systems are engineered from subsystems, blocks and elements for which you shall enter the corresponding reliability values. Schneider Electric provide you these data in the form of libraries, allowing you to copy them directly into your SISTEMA project, saving time and avoiding errors.
> Click here to download the « Preventa library for SISTEMA»
One provider for the complete safety chain:
Reduce cost on your safet y machine applications through only one automation and complete safety chain provider.
- Acquire the information: safety land magnetic switches, light curtains, safety mats, two-hand control stations, enabling and foot switches.
- Monitor and processing: safety relays modules, safety controllers and PLCs, ‘AS-interface’ safety field bus
- Stop the machine and inform people: contactors, variable speed drives and servo-drives, rotary switch disconnectors, beacons and sirens.
> Click here to download the « Preventa essential guide »
