EN ISO 13857 Machinery Safety - Safety Distances to Prevent Upper and Lower Limbs from Reaching Hazardous Areas

EUROLAB laboratory provides testing and compliance services within the scope of EN ISO 13857 standard. The EN ISO 13857 standard, developed by the International Standards Organization (ISO), sets values ​​for safety distances in both industrial and non-industrial environments to prevent machine danger zones from being reached. Safety distances are suitable for protective structures. It also gives information about the distances that will prevent free access of the lower limbs.

This document covers persons 14 years of age and older. In addition, it provides information for upper limbs only, for children over 3 years old where access through openings needs to be addressed. It is not practical to set safety distances for all persons. Therefore, the values ​​presented are intended to cover the 95th percentile of the population. Data on preventing lower extremity access for children were not considered.

Distances are only applied when sufficient risk reduction can be achieved with distance. As safety distances are size dependent, some oversized persons will be able to reach danger zones even if the requirements of this document are met.

Compliance with the requirements in this document will prevent access to the danger zone. However, the user of this document is advised not to provide the necessary risk reduction for every hazard (eg hazards related to machine emissions such as ionizing radiation, heat sources, noise, dust).

Substances covering the lower limbs are only applied on their own when the access of the upper limbs to the same danger zone cannot be foreseen according to the risk assessment. Safety distances are intended to protect persons trying to reach dangerous areas under specified conditions. This document is not intended to provide safeguards against reaching a danger zone by climbing over it.

The concept of machine safety considers the ability of a machine to perform its intended functions throughout its lifecycle, where the risk is sufficiently reduced. This International Standard is the basis for a number of standards with the following structure:

• Type A standards (basic safety standards) that give basic concepts, design principles and general directions applicable to machines;
• Type B standards that deal with an aspect of safety or some form of protection that can be used across a wide range of machinery: B1 and B2;
• Type C standards (machine safety standards) that deal with detailed safety requirements for a particular machine or group of machines.

This document is a type B12100 standard as specified in ISO 1. This document is particularly important for the following stakeholder groups representing market players in machine safety:

Machinery manufacturers (small, medium and large enterprises);
Health and safety agencies (regulators, accident prevention agencies, market surveillance, etc.);

Among the services provided by our organization within the framework of material testing services, there are also EN ISO 13857 standard tests. Do not hesitate to contact our laboratory EUROLAB for your testing and certification requests.