Machinery Safety Information

Overview

With the release of ANSI 11.19 (2010) - Performance Criteria for Safeguarding, it consolidated all of the design, installation, operation and maintenance of Fixed Guards into a single American National Standards Institude (ANSI) standard.

In the 2010 release of ANSI 11.19 there were two fundamental changes:

ANSI B11.19 (2010) now applies to ALL machines and equipment.

There is no longer any difference between the guarding standards for:

Point of Operation

Mechanical Transmission Apparatus

This significantly simplied the process of determining whether a guard met the current ANSI standads, as there is now a single unified standard for all safeguarding.

Scope

This difference can be seen in the new Scope for ANSI B11.19 (2010) Performance Criteria for Safeguarding, which includes all machinery (not just machine tools). Further, the guarding requirements no longer seek to differentiate between guarding of Point of Operation, and guarding of all other hazards on a machine.

Scope of ANSI B11.19
This standard provides performance requirements for the design, construction, installation, operation and maintenance of the safeguarding listed below when applied to machines.

Guards (Section 7);

Safeguarding devices (Section 8);

Awareness devices (Section 9);

Safeguarding methods (Section 10).

Note: This standard does not provide the requirements for the selection of the safeguarding for a particular application.

Performance Requirements

The ANSI B11.19 (2010) Performance Criteria for Safeguarding provides requirements for the following types of safeguarding:

Fixed Guards

Adjustable Guards

Interlocked Guards

Perimeter Guards

Pullback Devices

Presence Sensing Devices

Single-hand Trip Device

Two-hand Trip Devices

Awareness Signs, Signals, & Barriers

If you ard designing new machines, machinery, industrial automation, or equipment, this is the ANSI standard that you should be using.


For OSHA standards on machinery and equipment guarding, see OSHA Standards for Machine Guarding


For training on OSHA and ANSI methods of machinery and equipment guarding, see OSHA and ANSI Training