Brick Manufacturing

Building Products

ASiSafe from Siemens monitors safety at Baggeridge Brick

Baggeridge Brick Plc one of the UK’s largest brick manufacturers, had identified a problem on its ‘dryer car’ operation, responsible for the movement of wet brick palettes into drying and firing chambers. The car itself moves on rails at speeds of up to 15mph and had no perimeter safety guarding to protect entrance into the hazard area.

Dennis Brittle, Group Engineer at Baggeridge Brick, was concerned about the health and safety risk: “The dryer car runs at substantial speeds once operated and passers-by were being placed in significant risk due to the lack of perimeter guarding. This has been a problem for us for a number of years and with the new safety standards EN62061 and EN13849 being adopted across Europe and the UK, and the move to fully automatic operation (no driver) we felt we had to find a suitable and safe solution.

The second problem lay within the car’s ability to move between operational zones within the plant. Each area demands a different level of safety protection, but the ‘outdated’ system failed to monitor those workers entering and leaving the zones at any one time. Operators were placed in hazardous circumstances which could have led to risk of injury.

Brittle continued: “We had absolutely no way of monitoring the operational zones within the plant, there were no security codes in place and the zones were easily accessible to any member of staff. Workers could gain access to these highly hazardous areas and we would be unable to guarantee their safety”.

Industry specialists, Siemens Automation and Drives were brought in to provide a safety design solution which would actively reduce the risk of injury.

Parmley Graham, a Siemens integrator in the Midlands, was presented with the initial specification, which contained two strict requirements. Firstly, integrate a new safety system into the ‘dryer car’ to prevent accidents and provide greater levels of zone security. Secondly, ensure the installation provides no disruption to overall working and production targets.

Brittle highlighted: “We needed a completely versatile system which would enable us to monitor the safety of the dryer car operator and at the same time ensure zone security and safety by limiting entrance to pre-determined personnel as per the requirements of our risk assessment.”

Siemens engineered a solution involving ASiSafe, standard Asi control and an S7 PLC.

Paul Hingley, product manager for communications at Siemens, says:

“The system provided for Baggeridge Brick had to tick a number of very important boxes. The system needed to offer full diagnostic capability to monitor any change in the dryer car or additional machinery programming. The system also had to offer advanced override safety facilities, operators could only gain safe entrance into the various operational zones.

“In addition Baggeridge Brick were specific in their requirement for a virtually maintenance free piece of equipment. The ASiSafe system has various levels of self-monitoring providing instant diagnostic information via the PLC and has the flexibility to be re-programmed as necessary by the various ‘security cleared’ operators.

“Together with Parmley Graham we have supplied a completely integrated control and safety solution on one network. This provides ease of installation and the ability to construct complex safety control logic, whilst at the same time reducing the administrative downtime previously needed to monitor and programme the equipment.”

The entire system was retrofitted into the plant and complete on-site training was provided following installation.

Brittle concluded: “The Siemens ASi and ASiSafe system is completely versatile and was easily integrated into our existing working processes. We are now fully compliant with the safety category required by our risk assessment and are happy in the knowledge that our machine operators are being monitored 24hr a day by Siemens AsiSafe.”

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