| All power presses (punch presses), including brake presses, hydraulic presses, mechanical presses and pneumatic presses, are subject to the safety standards, as detailed in CSA Z142-02, the consequences of non-compliance can be very serious.
This comprehensive standard increases worker security and can also deliver improved operational productivity and mechanical fault monitoring. It’s all about control and safeguarding. EFP can assist you in bringing older presses up to today’s standard.
We retrofit, remanufacture and rebuild presses to meet Z142-02. Comprehensive upgrades cover; safety parameters, hydraulic system double redundancy requirements and PLC upgrade, including operator interface.
The Process
- We begin by a complete inspection, produce a current state, desired state analysis, to bring your press into compliance and improve the overall productivity. We use real-time data acquisition technology to accurately measure safety control mechanisms.
- We discuss the areas of improvement, items such as; safety enclosures versus light curtains, floor mats, instrumentation, fault monitoring etc.
- We prepare a comprehensive report, under three sections:
- Safety parameters
- Hydraulic system double redundancy requirements
- PLC upgrade, including operator interface
- Dependent on the scope of the project, the overall plan can be structured in a scaleable manner
- We execute the upgrades, on your premises or ours, as appropriate.
- We conclude with a pre-safety inspection, using real-time data acquisition, to measure the improved safety efficiency, this inspection is conducted by a Mechanical Engineer licensed in Ontario. You retain the report for your compliance due diligence.
Reducing Press Machine Injuries
CSA Z142-02 requires improved control systems to improve the safety of working with power press machines. The solution involves a systematic approach for examining all control circuits, whether they are electrical or hydraulic.
Press machines; mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic or the like, are extensively used and represent the workhorses for most metal-product manufacturers. They are indispensable machines; however, they are inherently dangerous for the people involved in operating or maintaining them. That's one of the reasons the Canadian Standards Association has issued a new edition of its Z142 Power Press Standard.
Presses are known to be unforgiving, for they have the potential to inflict serious and often permanent injuries. If a company experiences incidents, it indicates that it’s operating or maintaining skill-sets alone may not be sufficient to avoid injuries.
A safe facility requires an added dimension for the overall safety of presses. This generally relates to the extent of design and engineering given to the active and passive supplemental safety devices in a press. In other words, it involves the level of control reliability.
Injuries, from an analytical sense, are preventable incidents. Control reliability is the best tool to prevent the likelihood of injury incidents.
Control Reliability
Control reliability refers to a device, system or interface that is designed, engineered, constructed and installed in such a manner that a single fault or malfunction will not prevent the normal stopping action and will prevent successive operation. In presses specifically, this means stopping actions shall always be achieved and shall prevent a successive stroke of the press until the problem is corrected.
Control reliability, in essence, is the cornerstone of press safety and represents the main theme emphasized in the recently published CSA Z142-02 standard -- Power Press Operation: Health, Safety and Guarding Requirements. The standard underscores the significance of control reliability in press safety. The objective of the standard is to reduce the risk of injury due to hazards from operation, maintenance and setup while working on, or adjacent to, a power press.
Arguments are easily made that control reliability is, or can be, an expensive proposition. Skill is needed to optimize costs to achieve a good measure of control reliability, while at the same time meeting safety compliance requirements. Achieving control reliability is therefore a science. It is a product of both safety engineering acumen and an in-depth comprehension of machine design, particularly with presses.
False Sense of Security
Some industries should be applauded for their initiatives to spend money acquiring and installing safety protection devices. However, poor engineering and installation techniques could render very little value to the overall safety component expenditures.
It is not uncommon to find that many installations have employed expensive electrical safety protection devices such as light curtains, scanners, etc., while the control reliability is weak or nonexistent because of a poor utilization of expenditures. This situation unfortunately provides the machine operator with a false sense of security.
Control reliability in presses must recognize the safety integrity of both the mechanical and electrical infrastructure. A systematic approach must be developed to examine all control circuits (electrical, hydraulic, etc.) to assess whether they meet the intent of the Z142-02 standard.
Design and Application
Control reliability, according to the Z142-02 standard, specifies that safety circuits for electrical, hydraulic, pneumatic and muting, shall be dual channel with monitoring, and designed, constructed and applied in such a way that any single component failure shall not prevent the stopping action of the press. Furthermore, the safety control systems shall be hardware-based and include automatic monitoring at the system level.
The Z142-02 standard affects all power presses that are fitted with a ram (plunger or slide) and dies for the purpose of blanking, cutting, trimming, drawing, punching, forming, stamping, assembling, or processing metal or other material. This new edition of the standard came into effect on Jan. 31, 2003.
Z142-02 is a National Standard of Canada, and is mandated in legislation in most provinces. The legislation requires that a schedule be developed and implemented that will ensure compliance with all applicable parts of this standard no later than two years from the date of publication.
The time to act is now. Formalizing what needs to be done to be compliant, and identifying the associated costs, should be the order of the day. Probable expenditures will warrant fresh money from new capital budgets, appropriately earmarked to support the undertaking.
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