Functional Safety

Industrial Safety Basics-Machine Safety

This entry was tagged Beginner

Machine Safety Machine Safety is the protection of personnel or plant assets from damage or death. Components of machine safety include: Organizational safety (Requirements for safety shoes, FRC, safety glasses, etc.) Passive Safety (guard rails, covers for moving parts, gates) Functional Safety  (Protection from hazards due to incorrect functioning of the industrial machinery) Functional Safety This article will focus on Functional Safety for the factory automation environment. Common components […]

Safety Basics – Conventional vs Combined Safety

This entry was tagged Beginner

Safety PLCs are special controllers built and certified to meet international safety requirements such as NFPA 79,  IEC 62061, IEC 13849-1 or IEC 61508. All of these safety standards define levels of risk reduction. Conventional Safety PLC Principle The original safety PLC concept required that normal PLCs and standard I/O could not be mixed with safety PLCs and safety components in the same network. […]

Industrial Safety: PROFIsafe Profile Overview

This entry was tagged Intermediate

PROFIsafe (PROFINET safety) is a safety communication technology for discrete manufacturing and process automation systems. It was developed by PROFIBUS / PROFINET International (PI) to meet Functional Safety requirements for PI communication technologies (PROFINET, PROFIBUS, and PROFIBUS PA).  As we talked about in Safety Basics, the PROFIsafe role in the safety universe is to minimize the chance of incorrect functioning of the control system. Incorrect functioning for a PROFsafe […]

PROFIsafe Profile: Industrial Safety

This entry was tagged Intermediate

PROFIsafe profile details are incorporated into the PROFIsafe driver firmware in both an F-Controller and an F-device. The PROFIsafe driver is an encoding/decoding package that ensures the integrity of the safety portion of the communication. Network Communication Challenges The following errors are potential problems in network communications. Repetition – malfunction of a bus device causes old and obsolete safety messages to be repeated at the wrong time […]