Proposition of an approach applicable during the design process of working equipment to identify potential hazards for workers

With technological improvements and regulation evolutions, the work of product designers change too. They have to work on different aspects of a product such as technological, legal, environmental and safety at work. The European directive 2006/42/CE promulgates machine safe design principles to prevent professional risks. They guide machine designers to reduce residual risks as much as the technological state of art permits it. Special machine designers are by definition confronted to a lack of specific standards to do an a priori risk analysis. The aim of this paper is to present an original approach to help them for the hazards identification, the soonest and all along the design process.
This approach is based on the fact that hazards are linked to the presence of energies. Hazards identification can be done through the detection of parameters linked to energy sources and flows. The approach then return information to designers about potential contacts between energies and workers, to highlight the necessity to add preventive measures.
We use the Functional Energetic Model to represent the machine energy architectures through its different lifecycle steps. By using it, it is possible to identify every interfaces through which energies circulate. These interfaces are defined by two kinds of parameters: energetic parameters (linked to energy properties), and other design parameters.
This paper first presents a detailed energetic parameters classification that are in consequence indicators of hazards presence in the machine. Then we present logical rules for the process of these energetic parameters with the others, in order to raise the accuracy of the hazard identification. To finish, we present results of the use of this approach during the industrial design of a supply line to confirm that it is usable since the earliest design stages with an improvement of accuracy during the next design stages.