Functional Safety

Safer machines with integrated safety

What is functional safety?

Functional Safety entails the detection of a potentially dangerous condition resulting in the activation of a protective or corrective device or mechanism to prevent hazardous events arising or providing mitigation to reduce the consequence of the hazardous event.

In the design of a machine, a risk assessment must be performed and then updated regularly. As far as possible, the machine should be designed to be inherently safe, so that hazards are eliminated from the basic design. However, in most cases some risks remain at an unacceptable level and must be actively reduced using suitable control measures.

Why integrated safety?

The integration of motion safety functions in the drive supports a decentralized approach to the machine's functional safety that brings many benefits

Reduced complexity and therefore design time
Reduced wiring and consequential costs
Ease of commissioning
Speed of actuation due to close-coupling of safety function and drive

Functional-Safety-Conventional-Integrated-Approach-Diagrams

More safety with less wiring

Activate and monitor all motion safety functions over the fieldbus for minimum wiring and maximum flexibility.

The black channel principle allows safety data to travel alongside standard, non-safety-relevant information on the same Ethernet medium.

This means that even complex safety configurations can be implemented with minimal wiring and without changes to the existing network topology.

MiS210 and MiS250 safety options support all the main industry standards for easy integration in any automation architecture.
- CIP-Safety on EtherNet/IP
- Safety over EtherCAT (FSoE)
For extra flexibility, safe position and speed values can be transferred to an external controller for further processing.

Support for the Safe EnDat protocol means that the maximum safety integrity level can be achieved without the need for extra wiring and additional feedback devices.