QA informs about the new EC machin­ery directive

The event which was the sec­ond of this year´s pre­sen­ta­tion series was well vis­it­ed. As the first road show deals with the analy­sis of profibus prob­lems now the con­se­quence of the new EC machin­ery direc­tive was explained by Mr. Springsguth, Mr. Süsel­beck und Mr. Knauf of QA´s sys­tem part­ner Mit­subishi Elec­tric Europe. The back­ground and the legal sit­u­a­tion as well as the risk analy­sis and the prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tion were the top­ics. The most impor­tant item – and as it turns out only a few per­sons are aware of that – becomes valid on 31.12.2009. It does not only define to fix and imple­ment a safe­ty step but also to doc­u­ment that so that it will be com­pre­hen­si­ble for every­one – but also to be on the safe side regard­ing law in case of damage.

Which of the new stan­dards must be applied in a par­tic­u­lar case?
EN62061 or ISO13849‑1?

With­in both stan­dards a dif­fer­ent method for the eval­u­a­tion of a safe­ty func­tion is indeed applied but the results can be con­vert­ed into one anoth­er. Fur­ther­more, some vis­i­tors do not know that an orig­i­nal oper­at­ing instruc­tion in offi­cial lan­guage must be avail­able and that every plant needs an EC con­for­mi­ty dec­la­ra­tion includ­ing CE con­for­mi­ty mark when it is put in cir­cu­la­tion at the lat­est. The miss­ing of doc­u­ments like the EC con­for­mi­ty dec­la­ra­tion is accus­able and can lead to the result that the equip­ment will be kept in cus­toms clear­ance until the miss­ing doc­u­ments are received.