Designing Machinery to Meet Global Safety Requirements 981320
The global harmonization of safety standards, and the desire of machinery manufacturers to produce “world” products, has resulted in the adoption of many of the machine guarding design concepts embodied in the European Machinery Directive (EMD).
These include:
Positive-opening contacts
Tamper-resistance
Positive-guided relays
Control reliability
Cross-monitoring/checking
Redundancy
Risk assessment.
This paper reviews these design concepts and some of the technologies which address these requirements. In addition it provides examples of a few of the new types of devices available to design engineers to satisfy the most stringent international safety standards.