Functional Safety

On December 29, 2009, the revised European Machinery Directive, 2006/42/EC, came into force. This legislation affects all OEMs that manufacture or sell off-highway vehicles within Europe.

To help our customers meet the new directive/standards, and enable them to create the mandatory Declaration of Conformity (DoC), Sauer-Danfoss will provide:

• Data, such as Mean Time To dangerous Failure (MTTFd ), for our standard products
• Specially designed products, to facilitate compliance with the new functional safety standards (to meet certain SIL or Performance Levels)

As a result, OEMs can speed up system development, reduce total installed costs, and bring off-highway vehicles to market faster.

Figure 1: Machinery Directives and Harmonized Standards Overview

New Legislation 

All off-highway vehicles manufactured or sold in Europe must comply with the revised Machinery Directive in order to establish an EC Declaration of Conformity (DoC) and CE mark their vehicles. As a result of the new Directive, international safety standards, such as the harmonized EN ISO 13849-1 standard, have been updated. New safety demands are also reflected in industry specific standards, for example, ISO 25119 Agriculture and Forestry and ISO 15998 for Earth-moving machinery are considered as best practice when designing new vehicles.

Mandatory Risk Assessment 

According to 2006/42/EC, the manufacturer of machinery or his authorized representative must ensure that a hazard and risk analysis is carried out in order to determine the health and safety requirements which apply to the machinery. The machinery must then be designed and constructed taking into account the results of the risk assessment.

Functional Safety 

The new EN ISO 13849-1 standard extends and replaces the existing EN 954-1 standard (European Norm). EN ISO 13849-1 has been developed within the ISO community to ensure that it is not just a European standard, but a global standard. This new standard introduces a probabilistic approach to function verification based on the MTTFd sum of components and diagnostic coverage (DC).