Guardian Tech Note

The Machinery Directive standard EN ISO 13849-1 is a European safety regulation. This is a generic standard defining the requirements for the safety-related parts of control systems.. The primary goal of the Directive is to ensure that equipment will function in a safe manner. There are many specific standards that can be used to show compliance to the Machinery Directive. To that end, machines and their components are expected to function safely. A pressure sensor—while not the only component—is a machinery component that is expected to comply under the Directive, when they are used in a safety function on a machine.

Determining functional safety is complicated and minimally involves an assessment of the probability of failure, an assessment of impact resulting from failure, and a path to address a failure should it occur. While the supplier evaluates and classifies the safety assessment of his equipment, the user decides, selects, installs, and tests the type of equipment that is needed.