Standards for functional safety. Part I: GN ISO 13849-1

摘要

With the European Commission allowing EN 954-1 to continue to presume conformity with the essential health and safety requirements of the new Machinery Directive (2006/42/EC), Dave Collier urges manufacturers to ignore the extension and to start using EN ISO 13849-1 or EN 62061 as soon as possible. In this first of two articles, he looks at EN ISO 13849-1.rnThe newer functional safety standards are intended to encourage designers to focus on the functions that are necessary to reduce each individual risk and what performance is required for each, rather than simply relying on particular components. These standards make it possible to achieve greater levels of safety throughout the machine's life. Their creation was also due to the increasing complexities of modern machine control systems that were not adequately dealt with in EN 954-1 and take into account the reliability of the safety circuit components and its ability to detect/diagnose faults and reject common cause failure.