Machinery safety conference
August 1st 2007 The Machinery Safety Conference and Exhibition organised by BARA (the British Automation and Robot Association) held in July at the National Codes Centre, Bletchley Park, successfully decoded the current machine safety standards situation and gave an insight into the transition from EN 954-1 to standards based on the concept of functional safety. Steve Shaw of the HSE opened the conference with a tutorial on Risk Assessment and Safety Integrity Level (SIL) assignment, while providing a view on the current standards situation. Philip Parry, also from the HSE, then presented a paper on functional safety and power drive systems for safety-related applications. Paul Laidler of event sponsor Laidler Associates and Steve Allen of Procter Machine Guarding undertook a well received double act, showing project management of a safety solution on a robotic cell, including CE marking and guarding. The remainder of the day featured case studies demonstrating safety-related engineering in a variety of applications using safetyrelated networking technologies. BARA is now planning other events on these topics (details to be confirmed). More articles from BARA: | 
