While this is a key reason companies turn to UL for assistance in product development, there are numerous other reasons, including customer requirements, legislative requirements, regulatory oversight, and trade union demands.
As systems rely on increasingly sophisticated hardware and software, safety becomes more dependent on the relationships between products and their responses to inputs.
Neither overall product safety nor functional product safety can be determined without carefully evaluating a product’s systems as a whole and assessing the environment with which they interact.
No one is better positioned to help you with this work than UL. UL can evaluate your safety-related products to a variety of functional safety standards, including but not limited to:
• IEC 61496: evaluation of safety-related electrosensitive protective equipment
• IEC 61508: evaluation of functional safety of products, components, and systems, which covers electrical/electronic/programmable electronic (E/E/PE) safety-related systems and assessment of the proper safety integrity levels (SILs) of your product or system
• IEC 61511: safety for instrumented systems for the process industry sector
• IEC 61800-5-2: safety for adjustable speed electrical power drive systems
• IEC 62061: safety of machinery and functional safety of safety-related electrical, electronic, and programmable electronic control systems
• EN ISO 13849-1: safety of machinery and safety-related parts of control systemsAmong the key deliverables UL provides after conducting a functional safety evaluation are informative test reports and type examination reports.
Consolidating product testing and certification at one global organization creates significant efficiencies that can deliver greater return on functional safety compliance investment.
For more information on how UL can help you achieve this, please visit us on the web at www.ul.com/functionalsafety.