Drive provides integrated safety
22 June 2007
Rexroth's IndraDrive with 'Safety on Board' helps to enhance operator safety and process reliability, and is primarily used by manufacturers of high-output printing and paper converting machines. This new generation of drives from Rexroth is certified to EN 954-1 Category 3 and offers short response times of 2 ms. That means the drives installed in Rexroth's SYNAX 200 system are promoting integrated safety.
With printing and paper converting machinery, there are plenty of situations during operation when the machine operator has to work directly on the machine. This is essential when changing plates, blankets or tools, cleaning cylinders, webbing up or removing a paper jam or punching scrap. To avoid the risk of accidents in these situations, the EN 1010-1 to EN 1010-5 standards lay down guidelines and safety requirements for the design and construction of printing and paper converting machines.
These requirements are traditionally satisfied through the use of additional monitoring devices and sensors for speed. They work in parallel with the controlled drives and cut off power to the drive in the event of a hazard. However, given the constant rise in machine speeds, signal and switching delays mean that these solutions are less able to guarantee the required level of personal safety.
With a response time of 2ms, ‘Safety on Board’ offers decentralised safety at the location of the incident without the need for additional hardware or routing through the control, even with high-speed axes. In addition to improved protection for the operator, the safety technology increases the availability of machines since production can be restarted more quickly after manual intervention than was previously the case.
Rexroth combines the guaranteed single fault safety with a package of safety functions. Alongside the Safe standstill and Safe operational stop functions with stop categories 0, 1 and 2, it is now also possible to monitor ‘safe movements’ at reduced speed, limited increment, limited maximum rotational speed or defined direction of rotation in the drive itself. The safety features are complemented by safe absolute position ranges as well as safe control of a door locking device as soon as all axes of a safety zone are in a safe state. Because power and functionality in the IndraDrive generation have been decoupled, ‘Safety on Board’ is available in a power range up to 160kW.
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