With Australian industry being hard pressed to maintain a productive and competitive manufacturing operation, it is also faced with the need to adhere to regulated safety requirements and reduced injury and incident rates. As a result, industry has a serious need for technology and safety systems that satisfy each of these demands.
Companies are required by law to meet the challenge of avoiding industrial accidents by minimising the risk posed to their employees by equipment located within the working environment. Whether in the case of packaging, materials handling or robotic applications, protecting employees from injury caused by unprotected, undesired or uncontrolled movements is of paramount importance.
End users will require differing levels of safety functionality in their plants, and often rely on machine designers to perform the risk analysis in order to identify the level of safety required.
Once the safety level is determined, product manufacturers are then responsible for supplying individual components, when harmonised together as a complete package, comply with the relevant safety level. Many benefits are associated from sourcing complete drive package solution with incorporated functional safety from a single drive solutions provider.
Benefits can also be seen in the areas of; reduced engineering time, reduced costs due to the elimination of external protection devices, reduced energy waste, reduced maintenance costs and improved machine operating efficiencies.
In compliance with EN ISO 13849-1, intended to minimise the risk posed to employees by technical equipment, the MOVISAFE safety controller is flexible and easy to program with its integrated safety function for all crucial safe motion requirements.
SEW's safety package comprises of gearmotors with built-in safety rated brakes and safety rated encoders, frequency inverters and decentralised drive systems with integrated safe torque off (STO) functionality up to PLe in accordance with EN ISO 13849-1, matching safety controllers for safe input monitoring, safe limited speed and safe positioning, and accessories like prefabricated encoder cables that will minimise errors and reduce wiring efforts.