Machine Safety Conference 2008 - Report & Papers

This annual event took place at Bletchley Park, in September 2008 and was considered to be a lively and informative sucess.

Peter Cheetham, Chairman of the AS-Interface Expert Alliance, presented his paper entitled “AS-i Safety at Work in practice” followed by a question & answer session.  You can download Peter’s paper by following this link.  Safety_at_Work_-_Next_Generation.pdf

MachineBuilder.Net have written a great review of the event.  Including the following extract which relates to AS-i.  You can view the full review here: http://www.machinebuilding.net/n/n1212.htm

Peter Cheetham, Chairman of the AS-Interface UK Expert Alliance, discussed the advantages offered by AS-i Safety at Work (ASiSafe), especially now that remote output modules are available and the configuration software provides a far more intuitive overview of the circuit logic. He also reported that the UK market is currently seeing an annual growth in sales for safety slaves in excess of 60 per cent. This is thought to be largely due to machine builders and system integrators using ASiSafe alongside fieldbus networks. Although ASiSafe was developed to provide safety functionality on the same cable as a conventional AS-i network, the ease with which AS-i can be interfaced with higher-level networks (such as DeviceNet, Profibus, CC-Link and Industrial Ethernet) enables machine builders to use their customers’ choice of fieldbus for automation and control, plus ASiSafe for the safety-related control system. Alternatively, ASiSafe can be retrofitted easily on machines that are having just their safety systems upgraded.

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