Machinery Safety 101
12 July, 2021

Understanding Safety Functions: the Safety-related stop function

by Doug Nix
in Complementary Protective Measures, Control Functions, Emergency Stop, Functional Safety, Interlocks, Interlocks, ISO 13849
A stop sign - A red octagon with a white border, and white block text reading STOP.
This entry is part of 3 in the series Under­stand­ing Safety Functions

The most used safety func­tion on machinery is the safety-related stop func­tion. The require­ments dis­cussed in this post are not gen­er­ally applic­able to pro­­cess-related stop func­tions unless the pro­cess and… 

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2 June, 2021

Manual reset using an HMI

by Doug Nix
in Complementary Protective Measures, Control Functions, Control Reliability, Emergency Stop, Functional Safety, Inherently Safe Design, ISO 13849 /
1 Comment
A Siemens HMI displaying control functions and data.
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Under­stand­ing Safety Functions

Ques­tion: Can a safety-related stop func­tion, for example, be reset via a graph­ic­al object rep­res­ent­ing a reset but­ton on an HMI? The short answer: No, with an excep­tion. Read on if you’d like… 

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20 April, 2019

Can Emergency Stop be used as an “on/off” control?

by Doug Nix
in Complementary Protective Measures, Control Functions, Emergency Stop, Functional Safety /
4 Comments
Emergency Stop Button
This entry is part 16 of 16 in the series Emer­gency Stop

Every couple of months I get an email ask­ing me if there is any reas­on why e‑stop func­tions can­’t be used as the primary power con­trol (on/off but­ton) for machinery. Following… 

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4 April, 2019

Introduction to Functional Safety Seminars

by Doug Nix
in Complementary Protective Measures, Control Functions, Emergency Stop, Events, Free Talks, Functional Safety, Guards and Guarding, Interlocks, Interlocks, ISO 13849, Seminars, Standards, Training
Man training a group of people, pointing to Functional Safety topics on the whiteboard

If you are inter­ested in func­tion­al safety, and I know many read­ers are based on the stat­ist­ics I see for my oth­er func­tion­al safety-related posts, I think you will be inter­ested in this.… 

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28 August, 2018

Emergency Stop Pull-Cords

by Doug Nix
in Complementary Protective Measures, Emergency Stop /
2 Comments
This entry is part 15 of 16 in the series Emer­gency Stop

When it comes to emer­gency stop devices there is no doubt that the red mush­­room-head push but­ton is the most com­mon – they seem to be every­where. The second most… 

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