Trends in safety engineering

摘要

David Dearden, UK&I Country Manager of leading safety specialist Euchner, examines the trends that are influencing the latest developments in machinery safety. Door open - door closed! In complex equipment installations, providing functional safety information about the door position and guard locking is often no longer sufficient. Comprehensive safety signals and diagnostics data supplied via local and plant-wide fieldbus systems reduce wiring, help with troubleshooting and give a realtime insight into the status of the safety systems. Issues such as door misalignment due to wear and tear can be highlighted well in advance of any line-stopping fault. Local networks such as IO-Link allow the simplified collection of information including alarms, equipment operating life and potential safety-system manipulation. Where plant uptime is critical, built-in web servers allow quick and easy safety-system status checks and diagnostic interrogation without specialist hardware, software or programming skills.