failure at all and time between failures. That tells you how much integrity a safety system has.”

The new standards are designed for machines that run at a higher level of complexity and manage greater amounts of data. “With the new standards, there’s a lot more data to crunch to determine the performance level,” says Robert Muehlfellner, automation director at B&R Industrial Automation Corp., another vendor, in Roswell, Ga. “There’s more and more online calculation on the performance levels, and manufacturers are adding their data into the safety tools. Now, if you have three machines, you can calculate your performance levels.”

While the European Union has provided a 24-month reprieve on compliance with the new standards, the machine industry is in full switch-over mode. All industries are becoming more global. The largest portion of machine and component manufacturers design their products to be sold in multiple regions. The idea of designing products specifically for the requirements of Europe is simply not practical.

Many of those involved in machine safety see the shift to the ISO and IEC standards as a step forward in unifying standards in a world of mixed requirements. “Ultimately, having a number of standards across the globe is a major problem for machine safety. The sheer quantity is almost ridiculous,” says Matthew Thornton, promotions management manager for functional safety at Siemens Industry Inc., the Alpharetta, Ga.-based automation supplier. “It’s about time for these standards to be aligned with each other.”

The machine builders have already started to seek global standards as they design equipment for best practices. “The machine-tool industry is global and there is increasing interest from domestic machine-tool builders and users to comply with international industry standards,” says Kevin Monnin, consulting applications engineer with machine tool applications engineering at Siemens.

U.S. affected

Do European standards mean much to machine builders and plants in the United States? After all, no organization is holding U.S. plants to the new safety standards. For mom-and-pop machine builders and plants with no global reach, the standards don’t apply. But the world of control systems is global now, so most machine builders in North America will likely adopt the new standards.

In the not-too-distant past, the regions of Europe, North America and Asia were mostly insolated. They had their own standards that didn’t necessary bleed into other regions. “Ten years ago, Europe was its own island, the United States was its own island. Now, there’s more coordination between regions, so machine builders and component builders want to design to a global standard,” says Chris Soranno, safety compliance manager, Omron STI, a North American provider of automation safeguard products and services with U.S. headquarters in Fremont, Calif.

Standards bodies don’t want to implement standards that are in conflict with other regions, and OEMs don’t want to build different machines for different regions. “The standards and regulations bodies in the United States are looking at how to implement these standards into our U.S. standards,” says Monnin, from Siemens. “So there’s a United States consensus to become more global. They’re embracing international standards.”

The new standards could become de facto standards without an official blessing. “In the Unites States, we have traditionally been behind Europe in adopting safety standards, and currently, our standards do reference some of the European standards, so these standards can be brought into the inspection of the machine if the inspector believes it is a commonly accepted industry standard,” says David Arens, food and packaging applications engineer at supplier Bosch Rexroth Corp., in Hoffman Estates, Ill. “It is important to recognize that these standards will be applied to the United States eventually.”

While U.S. plant are free from official requirements to comply with ISO 13849-1 and IEC 62061, the entire machine-building and component-producing industry is moving toward compliance. Europe may have kicked it off, but it did so with international standards, and those new standards are drifting across every region. Customers are beginning to expect that machines will comply with global standards. That alone will likely ensure eventual worldwide compliance.

Related Sidebar - The Details of the Safety Standards
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