Safety Standards For Automation Systems And Industrial Machinery

Review on Current EU Safety Directives and Standards for Automation Systems and Industrial Machinery

Describe about the Safety Standards for Automation Systems and Industrial Machinery.

Automation systems and industries involve giant sized fully functioning machineries and equipments for the manufacture, production and other purposes. In spite of the fact that these machines are extremely efficient in the operations for which these are used, there are a lot of risks with these machineries (Caputo, Pelagagge and Salini 2013). Owing to their huge sizes and dangerous shapes, they pose quite a threat to the workers in the industries. With increasing size of the machineries, chances of accidents also increase significantly. Moreover, in the factories where very high temperatures are used, the furnace machineries have chances of bursting that causes fatal damage to the nearby workers. Hence, some safety regulations and guidelines are required so that these heavy machineries are operated in the right manner and the chances of accidents are minimized (Suprem, Mahalik and Kim 2013). In the following essay, a review has been conducted on the current EU safety directives and standards for automation systems and industrial machinery.

The current EU safety directives and standards for automation systems and industrial machinery has two different categories of standards that are to be followed during operations. These are A-type Standards and B-type Standards. A-type Standards mainly deal with the basic concepts of operations and safety guidelines for the automations and machineries. The main reference for the standard is EN ISO 12100:2010, the main essence of which is the general principles of machine design (Gaj, Jasperneite and Felser 2013). It also contains risk assessment and risk mitigation guidelines. As these standards only state the basic concepts of safety guidelines, these are not really useful for implementation without additional information and concepts. Hence, the B-type Standards were introduced.

B-type Standards were designed to provide more details for the safety guidelines and machine designs. B-type Standards were not limited like the A-type Standards and hence, they were more useful for application in the industries and automation systems. However, as more and more details were added, the B-type Standards started to grow in size and the information for different types of operations and machineries (Chinniah 2015). However, after sometime, it was decided that these guidelines will be separated under different sections for different machineries and operations. Some of the important B-type Standards are as follows.

EN ISO 13849-1:2015 – This standard mainly deals with the basic safety guidelines for heavy machineries. However, in this standard, special emphasis is given to the parts of control systems that are to be controlled for safety purposes. This standard also contains general principle of design of the machineries.

A-type Standards

EN ISO 13849-2:2012 – This standard follows up from the previous standard and adds more information and data into the principles of the machine design and operations. There are more safety guidelines that have been added in this standard that are to be followed in the automation industry (Vyatkin 2013). Finally in the last part, instead of general principles of design, the validation guidelines for the machineries have been provided.

EN 62061:2005 – This standard contains some more guidelines on safety of automation equipments and machineries. However, the main parts of this standard mainly deals with electronic, programmable electronic and electrical control systems.

EN 60204-31:2013 – It is the standard for the small and medium sized machineries and operation equipments. This standard mainly deals with “Particular safety and EMC requirements for sewing machines, units and systems”.

EN 614-1:2006+A1:2009 – This standard deals with ergonomic design principles of machines and operation equipments. This set of guidelines contains basic concepts, definitions of terminologies and principles of the ergonomic design principles.

EN 614-2:2000+A1:2008 – This follows up from the previous standard and contains more information on the ergonomic design principles (Kova?i? et al. 2016). Following the basic set of the guidelines of the previous standard, this standard deals with “Interactions between the design of machinery and work tasks”.

Product Specific Standard: EN 13241-1:2003+A1:2011 – This particular standard is specific to the industrial products. The main gist of this standard deals with the standards to be followed for the manufacture of products with resistance and control characteristics.

Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC – The machinery directives are the set of standards that deal with the safety and operation guidelines for heavy industrial machines that work under high physical factors like pressure, heat and others (Vasic and Billard 2013). These machines have significant chances of major and fatal accidents and hence, some safety measures must be adopted to minimize chances of accidents. Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC was designed with specific safety standards and guidelines required to be followed before installation and operation of the heavy machineries. After the machineries are installed, this standard is applied to verify whether all the guidelines are met and satisfied or not.

Low voltage Directive 2014/35/EU – As with heavy machineries, safety standards are needed for using electrical equipments as well. In large industries, the electrical instruments are used with very high currents that can be fatal even with a simple touch. Hence, the Low voltage Directive 2014/35/EU was designed (Rausand 2014). This directive contains safety guidelines and standards for use and handling of electrical equipments with which, very high current is used. Before starting operations of an electrical machine, these safety standards must be verified and risks must be calculated so that suitable precautions can be taken.

B-type Standards

Overall Review – On the overall, the present EU safety directives and standards for automation systems and industrial machinery and mechanical apparatus has two unique classes of models that are to be taken after amid operations. These are A-sort Standards and B-sort Standards. A-type Standards principally manage the fundamental ideas of operations and wellbeing rules for the machineries and machineries. On the other hand, B-sort Standards were intended to give more subtle elements to the safety rules and machine plans (Rajan and Wahl 2013). A standard was designed in order to manage the fundamental safety rules for substantial hardware. Another standard was developed additionally contains general rule of outline of the machineries. These standards are more or less successful in providing proper and accurate guidelines and have successfully minimized chances of major accidents. Other standards were also developed with further modifications and these additions followed up from the past standards and included more data and information into the standards of the machine outline and operations. Some standards were developed for small and medium equipments as well and these for the most part managed specific wellbeing and EMC prerequisites for sewing machines, units and frameworks. This standard manages ergonomic outline standards of machines and operation supplies. Taking after the essential arrangement of the rules of the past standard, this standard manages connections between the outline of apparatus and work undertakings (Dixon 2014). Finally, some specific standards or directives were developed that were particular to the modern items. Machinery Directive 2006/42/EC was composed with particular wellbeing measures and rules required to be taken after before establishment and operation of the substantial machineries. Likewise, with overwhelming machineries, safety principles are required for utilizing electrical types of gear also. This mandate contains wellbeing rules and measures for utilize and treatment of electrical types of gear with which, high current is utilized. All these standards and directives were more or less successful and are successfully being implemented in global industries for verification of the available standard.

Conclusion

In this essay, a review on the current EU safety directives and standards for automation systems and industrial machinery has been published. In this report, the basic standards and directives have been discussed in order to understand their effects on the existing industries and automation systems.

References

Caputo, A.C., Pelagagge, P.M. and Salini, P., 2013. AHP-based methodology for selecting safety devices of industrial machinery. Safety science, 53, pp.202-218.

Chinniah, Y., 2015. Analysis and prevention of serious and fatal accidents related to moving parts of machinery. Safety science, 75, pp.163-173.

Dixon, J.B., 2014. Design Guide to Industrial Control Systems (Doctoral dissertation, California State University, Sacramento).

Gaj, P., Jasperneite, J. and Felser, M., 2013. Computer communication within industrial distributed environment—A survey. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 9(1), pp.182-189.

Kova?i?, Z., Butler, M., Lista, P., Vasiljevi?, G., Draganjac, I., Mikli?, D., Petrovi?, T. and Petric, F., 2016. Harmonization of Research and Development Activities Toward Standardization in the Automated Warehousing Systems. In Autonomous Industrial Vehicles: From the Laboratory to the Factory Floor. ASTM International.

Rajan, A. and Wahl, T. eds., 2013. CESAR: Cost-efficient Methods and Processes for Safety-relevant Embedded Systems (No. 978-3709113868, pp. 343-366). Springer.

Rausand, M., 2014. Reliability of safety-critical systems: theory and applications. John Wiley & Sons.

Suprem, A., Mahalik, N. and Kim, K., 2013. A review on application of technology systems, standards and interfaces for agriculture and food sector. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 35(4), pp.355-364.

Vasic, M. and Billard, A., 2013, May. Safety issues in human-robot interactions. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on (pp. 197-204). IEEE.

Vyatkin, V., 2013. Software engineering in industrial automation: State-of-the-art review. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 9(3), pp.1234-1249.