Safety PLCs
Safety PLCs, or safety programmable logic controllers, are specialized devices used in safety systems to enhance functional safety in industrial environments. These safety devices are designed to keep processes safe and to make sure that, even in high-risk situations, operations continue as intended. Safety PLCs are situated at the heart of a safety program which relies on layers of protection to deal with the dangers that can arise from equipment failures or faulty conditions. These controllers are part of a system that achieves a particular safety integrity level—SIL, for short—and they function in a way that makes sure that all of us can comply with some pretty strict standards related to safety.
Safety PLCs are not your average PLCs. They possess some advanced features—like program flow control and well-designed diagnostics—that help keep them from failing and make them act in a way that's consistent with system integrity. And safety controllers are capable of identifying a number of serious issues—like internal faults and corrupted programs—that could easily get a normal PLC into some kind of trouble. When a safety controller identifies a serious problem, a built-in response mechanism ensures that the system transitions into some kind of safe state. Of course, safety relays, safety sensors and safety PLCs aren't the only components in an industrial safety architecture. Still, if you have a safety application, redundancy and state transition logic in your safety PLC make it an indispensable component.
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