Safety Design Of General Electric Products

Safety design of general electric products means to make sure that the products can not bring hazards to operators, service persons and surrounding environment. But now, most designers only focus on the functional implementation and neglect the safety performance of products. As a result, the products they made out often have potential hazards.Application of a safety standard in product design is intended to reduce the risk of injury or damage due to the following hazards: electric shock, energy related hazards, fire, heat related hazards, mechanical hazards, radiation, chemical hazards and so on. Designers shall take into account not only normal operating conditions of the equipment but also fault conditions, consequential faults, foreseeable misuse and external influences such as temperature, altitude, pollution, moisture, overvoltages on the mains supply and overvoltages on a telecommunication networks or a cable distribution system.There are three types of protective measures in safety design: direct safety protection, indirect safety protection and suggestive safety protection. To evaluate whether the design of products meets the safety requirements, tests related to suitable standards are performed on the products. Safety design is flexible, and there are no changeless patterns to follow. Nowadays, as electric products become more complicated and more intelligent, it is very difficult to provide safety protection to products in a single pattern. Different types of products and different application need different safety requirements and designation. In this paper, according to these seven types of hazards mentioned above, the reasons by which these hazards were caused, the damage which these hazards would arose and the principles which should be followed in safety design are explained; practical measures and examples, which are about to prevent these hazards, are introduced; systemic thoughts about safety design are provided to persons working in the field of electric product design.