Spurred by advancing technology and evolving industry standards, safety is moving from an afterthought to a central function of machinery designs. Safety is no longer an add-on, but is becoming a key element integrated early in the design process. In addition, the business case for machinery safety is well known among many end users, many are embracing safety more formally every day.
As a result, equipment manufacturers are challenged to keep pace with the growing sophistication of safety automation technology. They need to know which safeguards are appropriate for different hazards. Safety systems, when designed and engineered to match contemporary high-performing machinery, involve highly complex functions. As a result, the design process itself can be a barrier to improving worker safety and minimising risk in a way that optimises efficiency and boosts productivity.
In addition, designing a safety system often means navigating the ever-changing compliance landscape to determine what is required by local and international safety standards. OEMs have a responsibility to deliver machinery that is compliant with necessary regulations so end users can have confidence in the safety system. Determining which standards apply and what they require often adds confusion and lengthens the design process.
A set of time consuming tasks can confront design engineers evaluating and selecting safety automation products. It can be an arduous process of printing out machinery layout drawings, drawing hard and movable guarding, and identifying potentially hazardous access points. Not to mention identifying required safety functions, selecting safety input, output and logic devices, and calculating the achieved system performance.
Rockwell Automation is addressing this challenge with two new tools that automate and accelerate best-in-class safety functionality. The tools use the most complete offering of safety automation products and expertise in easy-to-use applications to dramatically reduce the time it takes to confidently design and deliver compliant machinery safety systems.
Safety designs in hours instead of days
The free Safety Automation Builder (SAB) software, which Rockwell Automation made available in February, accelerates safety-system development from early stage evaluation through design, layout and performance validation. The tool automates and simplifies the process end to end, using a powerful, intuitive user interface that walks a designer step by step through a complete safety-system design in less time while helping eliminate errors, omissions and miscalculations.
By leveraging the Rockwell Automation safety automation portfolio and applying best practices, SAB software automatically populates a SISTEMA1 project file, a conceptual safety layout drawing, an architectural structure drawing, and a bill of materials graphically depicted on the machinery.
SAB software follows the conventional design steps and guides a designer through a seven-step project flow. The user responds to questions and prompts to generate a safety automation solution using required input, logic, output and connectivity elements.
SAB-generated information exports seamlessly to ProposalWorks product selection software from Rockwell Automation. The design tool also creates a SISTEMA project file that automates calculations indicating the achieved performance level (PL) attained by the safety-system simulation. Ultimately, SAB software provides a designer with a compliant safety-system configuration in the form of a layout drawing, a complete bill of materials with pricing, and confidence that the selected hardware meets functional safety requirements.
At the ready: Pre-engineered Safety functions
At the end of the SAB process, a designer can also link to Safety Functions, a series of complimentary documents from Rockwell Automation to help users build a complete machinery safety system by providing detailed information for each safeguarding method, including its specific functionality, PL and required input, logic and output components. Safety Functions use a pre-engineered ‘building block’ approach to safety-system design. The user selects a required safeguarding function and combines pre-engineered blocks of detailed information to design a complete system.
Rockwell Automation will release 24 Safety Functions by mid-2013, each with a safety relay version (Allen-Bradley Guardmaster safety relay) and a programmable safety controller version (Allen-Bradley GuardLogix programmable automation controller). The six Safety Functions available online today at the Rockwell Automation Safety Resource Center include the following:
* Emergency stop solutions.
* Light curtain solutions.
* Enabling switch solutions.
* Two-hand control solutions.
* Door interlock solutions.
* Guard locking solutions.
Safety Automation Builder and the pre-engineered Safety Functions building blocks help OEMs design safety into machinery, rather than wrapping it on after the fact. The tools help accelerate and automate the complex safety design process to help OEMs reduce design time and costs, while having confidence in a safety system’s performance.
For more information contact Adrian van Wyk, Rockwell Automation, +27 (0)11 654 9700, [email protected], www.rockwellautomation.co.za
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