the required safety functions and risk reduction. A process of reviews and discussion of the intended function as well as formal hazard and risk analysis are applied to distinguish hazards and corresponding safety functions.
SAFETY INTEGRITY LEVEL (SIL)
Hardware and software safety systems in the industrial sector are becoming increasingly complex. Components are now sourced from multiple markets. In addition, development lifecycles have been significantly compressed. To mitigate these factors, your company must have a strategy for dealing with safety risks.
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL SAFETY?
Functional safety is the aspect of a system’s overall safety that depends on the system or equipment operating correctly in response to its inputs. This includes the safe management of potential operator errors, environmental changes, and hardware and software failures. Functional safety is an additional step beyond the traditional product safety assessment, as it deals with complex and interconnected technologies.
WHY IS FUNCTIONAL SAFETY IMPORTANT?
Companies operating in industrial environments are responsible for reducing safety risks to an acceptable level, including hazards caused by malfunctions of complex systems. Functional safety failures can result in serious liability claims. IEC 61508 is the standard governing functional safety worldwide as well as the derived standards: EN ISO 13849-1, IEC 62061, ISO 26262 and the EN 5012X series.
WHY CHOOSE WECERT FOR FUNCTIONAL SAFETY?
Type approvals of safety-related products
Type approvals provide evidence that a product meets the requirements of relevant product standards and that it can be used in the specified range of operation.
A type approval is structured in the following phases:
- Concept inspection: Because of the complexity of today’s devices, tests are carried out parallel to product development. The testing authority cooperates with the manufacturer during the early product specification and conception phases.
- Main inspection: During this phase, additional FS product tests are carried out. These include the calculation or validation of mandatory quantitative numbers according to IEC 61508, for a Safety Integrity Level (SIL); climatic, mechanical and electric testing for environmental aptitude; electric safety and equipment testing; assessment of applied measures for failure avoidance (quality assurance) covering the total life cycle of a product; inspection and evaluation of product documentation, especially installation and operating instructions and safety manuals. The main inspection concludes with a final test report.
- Certification: It is possible to certify both products and processes managing the product life-cycle. Any functional safety requirement for a component, subsystem or system should be independently certified according to one of the recognized functional safety standards. A certified product is then considered functionally safe to a particular SIL or a performance level in a specific range of applications. The certificate is provided to the customer with a test report describing the scope and limits of performance. All valid FS certificates issued by us for safety-related products and systems are available at Certipedia, our certificate database.
Functional safety certification means compliance
Our functional safety product assessments help you ensure that requirements and standards have been fulfilled. They also save time and money, enabling manufacturers to streamline development efforts, since our support starts in the early phases of concept development. This way our team of experts identifies possible obstacles early in the development process. This reduces the risk of unplanned additional development cycles. We document the fulfillment of relevant safety standards through the certification process and with our test mark, which reduces your liability and increases trust in your company.
Reliable functional safety assessments for your products
Contact US and get a Quote
Functional Safety Department
Product Certification Department
Mechanical products suitable for functional safety certification include:
- Equipment parts with safety functions.
- Industrial valves and sub-systems.
- Hydraulic, pneumatic and electromechanical components.
- Hydraulic, pneumatic and electrical drives and actuators.
- Hydraulic and pneumatic control systems.
- Sensors for physical size measurements like temperature, pressure, fill level and flow rate.
After confirming that your mechanical components are in accordance with ISO 61508, we apply our “SIL/PL capability” test mark.