Functional Safety
What is it? How does it apply to your business? Find out more here.
If you work with industrial machinery, safety systems or machine risk assessments, you have likely come across ISO 13849. It is one of the most widely used machinery safety standards in the world and plays a critical role in ensuring safety-related control systems perform reliably when required.
Whether you're designing new machinery, modifying existing equipment or carrying out a machinery safety assessment, understanding ISO 13849 is essential. The standard provides a framework for designing and validating safety-related parts of control systems, helping to ensure that safety functions redu...
BS EN ISO 13849-1 specifies the requirements for the design and implementation of machine safety related parts of control systems (SRCS) and is applicable where control systems contribute to the risk reduction on the machine
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Where there is a failure of that SRCS to provide risk reduction due (for example, a failure of hardware) would result in an immediate and unacceptable risk. The guidance provided gives a method for estimating the level (Performance Level) of risk reduction required by the SRCS but this the validation of the overall solution requires a knowledge of the protective devices...
What is Functional Safety?
Functional Safety is the overall safety of a system or piece of equipment and depends on the correct functioning of automatic protection operating correctly in response to its inputs or failure in a predictable manner.
The main objective of functional safety is to ensure that the automatic protection system in place, is designed properly (and safely) to overcome hardware failures, human errors and even environmental stress.
As modern-day manufacturing evolves, and with its added complexities, functional safety is vital in the safety of your business. Functional safet...