Standards Australia revises AS 4024.1 and adopts international machinery safety standards

Standards Australia has recently released a number of revised parts of the Australian Standard AS 4024.1 Series - Safety of Machinery to align with global standards and strengthen workplace safety.

The revised parts have been individually issued at this stage with the entire standard due to be released as a 2014 version once the application guide (part 1100) is finalised later this year.

The AS 4024.1 series provides designers, manufacturers, suppliers, employers and users of machinery with guidelines to help reduce the risks of working with, or near, machinery.

According to Scott Moffat, managing director of Pilz Australia, the Safety of Machinery Standard has grown in relevance over time. It has recently been adopted as an AS/NZS Standard and is now being revised to form closer alignment to the European machinery safety standards. It is also set to incorporate the new conveyor standard (AS1755) in the near future.

“It is a logical step to continue to update AS 4024.1 series to European standards as they lead the world in this area of machinery safety,” said Moffat.

Standards Australia’s Technical Committee said the principal task of the 2014 revisions for the AS4024.1 series was to consider the latest international standards and incorporate these into the original 2006 standard.

“The original standard was published as a series of small parts so that when new editions of relevant ISO, IEC or EN standards became available they could be adopted and published within the framework of AS 4024 with minimum delay,” said Standards Australia’s Technical Committee.

In total, 19 parts have been revised (1201, 1302, 1401, 1601&2, 1604, 1701-4, 1801&3, 1901-7); two new parts have been added (1303, 1503); and four parts superseded and withdrawn (1101, 1202, 1301, 1802) with the application guide (1100) to follow.

In summary the main changes are:

1. The risk assessment approach parts 1201 and 1303 (new) have been updated to reflect the global standards of ISO12100 (Machine Safety, General principles of Design, risk assessment and risk reduction) and ISO14121-2 (Practical examples of Risk Assessments).
2. A new Part 1503 that now gives the practitioner the option to design safety-related control systems using ISO13849-1 and the Performance Level (PL) approach. Note that Part 1501 (Category approach) still remains in the standard and the designer still has this option.
3. Parts 1602 (Interlocking Devices) and 1604 (Emergency Stop) are now both direct text adoptions of their international standards, ISO14119 and ISO13850 respectively.
4. Guarding Parts 1801 (Safety Distances) and 1803 (Minimum Gaps) are also now both direct text adoptions of their international standards ISO 13857 and ISO 13854.

“Pilz Australia and New Zealand is well placed to assist our customers with the revised standard as our company has a rich European background and a large number of technical experts locally and globally who are very familiar with all the European standards,” said Moffat.