Festo Compiles Vital Information on Machine Safety
Hauppauge, NY (PRWEB) December 06, 2013 -- For the past several years, culminating with a series of activities in 2013, Festo has been developing a range of materials to help OEMs more rapidly and accurately comply with international safety standards.
“Conformance to international safety standards opens the door to sales to multinationals and sales in international markets,” said Richard Huss, CEO of Festo U.S. “The issue becomes how to cost effectively engineer safety while navigating a complex series of international standards. Festo’s compilation of safety related material is designed to place a host of valuable, web-based information at the disposal of OEM engineering and safety personnel.”
Two must have documents for OEM safety engineering teams include the Safety Engineering Guidelines Pneumatic and Electric Solutions brochure and the Evaluation and Assessment of Safety Measures Poster. Both of these documents are available in downloadable PDF format. The catalog covers directives and standards, safety functions utilizing product examples, and training and consulting options. The use of product examples in the catalog helps make the directives tangible for the design engineering team. The poster is an excellent graphical reference tool for information on risk assessment criteria, designated architectures, common cause failures, mean time to failures, and much more. The poster covers EN ISO 13849-1 and IEC 61508, 61511, and 62061. Since these standards are close to U.S. and many Asian standards, the same concepts apply and help to clarify safety design considerations.
In conjunction with Automation World and Design World magazines, Festo sponsored and prepared a comprehensive presentation for a webinar on safety: Machine Safety 101 – Guidelines for Meeting Machine Safety Directive EN ISO 13849-1. The 45 minute presentation followed by a 10 minute question and answer session is available for download at the engineer’s or engineering team’s convenience. Following an overview of safety standards, Frank Langro, director of marketing and product management for Festo, presented a series of strategies for determining safety levels. The webinar provides an excellent overview, one hard to beat in terms of effective use of time and useful material.
Festo commissioned Control Design magazine to research and write a paper covering machine safety:Essentials of Machine Safety. This white paper, which is downloadable in PDF format, lays out a seven step process for meeting key ISO/IEC machine safety standards:
1. Assessment and risk reduction
2. Establish safety function requirements
3. Implement functional safety
4. Verify functional safety
5. Validate functional safety
6. Document functional safety
7. Prove compliance
The Festo Product Life Cycle brochure details the process used by Festo to determine service life expectancies for its products. In effect, this is a case study of how an international automation components and systems supplier develops test conditions, MTTF assessments, nominal service life expectancies, safety engineering, and total productive maintenance. There are numerous publications cited in the in the brochure for further reading.
Additional information on safety can be found on the Festo safety page of the company’s website. To discuss these issues in person, call Festo at 800-993-3786.
Media: Theresa Weston, Festo Corporation, http://www.festo.com/us, +1 (631) 404-3176, [email protected]
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