Machinery Safety 101

One of the big chal­lenges fac­ing machine builders has been choos­ing between ISO 13849–1 and IEC 62061. The IEC pub­lished a new guide at the end of July, 2010 called Technical Report IEC/​TR 62061–1 ed1.0 Guidance on the appli­ca­tion of ISO 13849–1 and IEC 62061 in the design of safety–related con­trol sys­tems for machin­ery. The new 38-​​page guide is avail­able as a hard copy or a PDF file. Written jointly by Technical Committee IEC/​TC 44, Safety of machin­ery – Electrotechnical aspects and Technical Committee ISO/​TC 199, Safety of machin­ery. The Technical Report was pub­lished in par­al­lel by ISO as ISO/​TR 23849.

Technical Reports don’t have the same sta­tus as International Standards, but pro­vide the TC’s with  a means to pro­vide guid­ance and expla­na­tion to help users imple­ment the standard.

Table of Contents

Since this is a copy­righted doc­u­ment, I can’t repro­duce it here. Instead, here’s the Table of Contents that will give you some idea of  the document’s contents.

IEC/​TR 62061–1

1. Scope
2. General
3. Comparison of standards
4. Risk esti­ma­tion and assign­ment of required performance
5. Safety require­ments specification
6. Assignment of per­for­mance tar­gets: PL ver­sus SIL
7. System design
8. Example
9. Bibliography

Merger Coming Soon

The intro­duc­tion to the TR indi­cates that it will be incor­po­rated into both IEC 62061 and ISO 13849–1 through a cor­ri­genda that ref­er­ences this new doc­u­ment. The cor­ri­genda will also remove the infor­ma­tion given in Table 1, Recommended appli­ca­tion of IEC 62061 and ISO 13849–1, found in the com­mon intro­duc­tion to both stan­dards and which is now out of date.

At some point in the near future, IEC and ISO  intend that ISO 13849–1 and IEC 62061 will be merged. A  Joint Working Group (JWG) of ISO/​TC 199 and IEC/​TC 44 will be formed to com­plete this task. No pub­lic time line has been set for this activ­ity, how­ever the Introduction to the Technical Report sug­gests that it may be a few years yet, as the TC’s involved want to get some feed­back from users on the lat­est ver­sions. If I had to haz­ard a guess, I would sug­gest that the new merged doc­u­ment might make its first appear­ance in 2013 when the cur­rent edi­tion of ISO 13849–1 comes up for main­te­nance revi­sion. I guess we’ll have to wait and see whether I’m right on that or not. In any case, I as a user of the stan­dards, I am whole­heart­edly behind the merger, and hope­fully the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, of these stan­dards to make them more acces­si­ble to the machine build­ing community.

Availability

A bilin­gual (English and French) ver­sion of IEC/​TR 62061–1 edi­tion 1.0 is available.

ISO/​TR 23849:2010 is avail­able as a 14-​​page doc­u­ment, in either English or French.

Download IEC stan­dards, International Electrotechnical Commission standards.

Watch for my review of this impor­tant new doc­u­ment com­ing in the next few days!

+DougNix is Managing Director and Principal Consultant at Compliance InSight Consulting, Inc. (http://​www​.com​pli​an​cein​sight​.ca) in Kitchener, Ontario, and is Lead Author and Managing Editor of the Machinery Safety 101 blog.

Doug’s work includes teach­ing machin­ery risk assess­ment tech­niques pri­vately and through Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Kitchener, Ontario, as well as pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal ser­vices and train­ing pro­grams to clients related to risk assess­ment, indus­trial machin­ery safety, safety-​​related con­trol sys­tem inte­gra­tion and reli­a­bil­ity, laser safety and reg­u­la­tory conformity.

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