What happened to the series?

If you’ve been reading this blog for very long. you’ll know that I frequently write a series of posts on a topic, like this one on how to do an ISO 13849-1 analysis. A few months ago, the software I have been using for many years to organize those series posts stopped working properly and…

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Are You Ready? WEEE Directive Full Implementation Starts 15-Aug-18

Processing of waste electrical and electronic materials

Many manufacturers selling industrial products into the EU market have come to understand at least one of the environmental protection Directives, RoHS – the “Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances.” In this post, I’m going to be looking at another environmental directive: WEEE – the “Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment” Directive (2012/19/EU). As of 14 August…

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New Directions in Plastics Machinery, ISO/TC 270

Row of blue and white plastic injection machines in an empty, clean workshop

Update to this article, September 2020. ISO 20430 was published in April 2020. ISO/TC 270 is now developing ISO 23582-1, Plastics and rubber machines — Clamping systems — Part 1: Safety requirements for magnetic clamping systems. Public review of ISO 23582-1 will start in the coming weeks, so if you are interested in this area,…

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Testing Emergency Stop Systems

An emergency stop button on an industrial control console is shown in the foreground, with the rest of the controls devices shown in soft focus behind it.

Updated 2020-10-31. DN I’ve had a number of questions from readers regarding testing of emergency stop systems, and particularly with the frequency of testing. I addressed the types of tests that might be needed in another article covering Checking Emergency Stop Systems. This article will focus on the frequency of testing rather than the types…

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Inconsistencies in ISO 13849-1:2006

I’ve written quite a bit recently on circuit architectures under ISO 13849-1, and one of my readers noticed an inconsistency between the standard text and Figure 5. This diagram shows how the categories can span one or more Performance Levels. If you look at Category 2 in Figure 5, you will notice that there are…

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