If there’s one constant to manufacturing operations in the developed world, it’s safety. As a result, the plethora of standards and practices that have been developed to keep manufacturers’ operations safe is mind-boggling and can be downright confusing.
To help sort through all the safety information available, Festo has compiled a range of materials to help OEMs 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 documents for OEM safety engineering teams offered by Festo include the Safety Engineering Guidelines Pneumatic and Electric Solutions brochure and the Evaluation and Assessment of Safety Measures Poster. 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 provides information on risk assessment criteria, designated architectures, common cause failures, and mean time to failures (MTTF). 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.
Festo also hosted a safety webinar with Automation World, which is now available for on-demand viewing. The webinar, Machine Safety 101 – Guidelines for Meeting Machine Safety Directive EN ISO 13849-1 is a 45-minute presentation that offers an overview of safety standards and a series of strategies for determining safety levels.
Also offered by Festo is its Product Life Cycle brochure which 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.
Additional information on safety can be found on the Festo safety page.
