Machine Safety Guarding Systems

AMS designs and integrates machine safety guarding as part of a broader controls and systems engineering practice. The guarding we deliver is engineered for the specific machine it protects: how operators interact with it, how it’s maintained, the throughput it must sustain, and the control architecture already in place.

Most machine safety guarding failures aren’t failures of the guard itself. They’re failures of a guard that wasn’t designed around how the machine is operated. A fence in the wrong place creates a workaround. A light curtain in the wrong location adds cycle time. A door interlock that ignores maintenance realities gets defeated on the second shift. These are engineering problems, and they’re the problems AMS is adept at solving.

Why Customers Come to AMS

Most of the machine safety upgrades and retrofits AMS takes on involve legacy equipment that falls short of present day safety standards. The trigger varies: a new corporate safety initiative, a leadership or ownership change, an internal audit, or a near-miss on the floor. Whether the scope calls for industrial safety guards, control system integration, or both, the job is the same: bring the machine up to current safety expectations without taking it out of production for long, and without forcing operators and maintenance staff into workarounds.

What We Do

AMS designs and integrates complete machine safety guarding systems, not just physical barriers. A typical project may include any combination of:

• Physical guarding: perimeter fencing, interlocked access doors, fixed-position guards
• Presence and position sensing: light curtains, area scanners, safety interlocks, and safety-rated position sensors
• Safety control systems: safety PLCs, safety relays, and distributed safety I/O
• Energy isolation: safety-rated drives, dump valves, and contactors for electrical, pneumatic, and hydraulic energy

We are platform-agnostic and work to customer preferences and existing plant standards. In practice, we deploy Rockwell GuardLogix and Siemens safety PLCs most often, Keyence for the majority of our safety area scanners, and safety sensors from Allen-Bradley, Banner, Sick, Pilz, Keyence, and Balluff, depending on the application.

The Engineering Difference

Many customers arrive with a partial picture of what they need, often “a fence and a light curtain.” Part of our job is expanding that picture into a complete machine safety guarding system that will actually hold up in production.

Risk assessment informs the design. Good safety system design starts with a clear understanding of the hazards. We perform Hazard Injury Risk Assessments (HIRA) in-house when the scope calls for it, and we also design from assessments the customer or a third party has already completed.

When we lead the assessment, we primarily follow ISO 13849. Under that framework, each task/hazard pair on a machine has its own Performance Level required (PLr), determined by the severity, frequency, and avoidability of the hazard. A machine’s safety system is the combination of those individual safety functions, each designed to its own PLr, not a single machine-wide rating. It’s a distinction that matters because designing every function to the highest PLr found anywhere on the machine can add cost and complexity that doesn’t improve safety.

The safety system must be informed by, and respect how the machine is used. The best guarding design anticipates not just the operator, but the maintenance technician, the setup person, and the troubleshooter at 2 a.m. We design for the person keeping the machine running, not just the inspector approving it.

Sometimes this means re-engineering a task rather than restricting it. On a paper machine winder running at several thousand feet per minute, an operator previously walked up to a web edge-detection sensor and adjusted its position by hand while watching the web. Once perimeter guarding was introduced, that location was inside the hazard zone. Rather than eliminate a necessary task or force a workaround, we installed a small linear actuator with pushbutton controls at the guard perimeter and position feedback on the HMI. The operator now makes the same adjustment safely from outside the guarded area. That kind of solution is second nature to an integrator who thinks about guarding and controls as a single system to coordinate.

Credentials

Our safety work is led by engineers with formal credentials in the field, including a TÜV Nord Certified Machinery Safety Expert (CMSE) and a B11 Licensed Machinery Safety Specialist (B11 LMSS). Combined with AMS’s controls engineering expertise, this is the foundation for machine safety guarding that works mechanically, electrically, and operationally. Together, they bring the technical depth required to design and integrate safety guards for machines across a wide range of industries and hazard profiles.