The Safety Justification is a document that assesses the risks, and indicates the necessary measures, in order to ensure and maintain the safety of machinery and technical devices, from the project phase right through to start-up, including maintenance and resuming production after a repair. It is a document that, due to its own specific characteristics, should accompany the machinery during its entire life cycle.
As far as certification is concerned, the Safety Justification is a requirement in order to obtain most of the EAC Certificates of Conformity and EAC Declarations of Conformity, (read all about EAC Marking), based on the following Eurasian Union Technical Regulations:
TR CU 010/2011 – On safety of machinery and equipment
TR CU 032/2013 – On safety of pressure equipment
This means that a copy of this document must be submitted to the body responsible for certification.
The foreign manufacturer may know this document by its acronym OB, which derives from the Russian official name Обоснование Безопасности. In English it could be translated as Safety Justification but is widely extended the title Justification of Safety.
Whatever name you may give to this, very few people know that there are two versions of this document.
The short (or declarative) version does not include test results and is specifically designed to obtain conformity with the relevant EAC regulation. The long version (also called “full OB”), on the other hand, includes all the test results and calculations, documented evidence of safety measures, as well as documents from the design and operational phases of the machinery.
For the development and implementation of the Safety Justification, we use the Russian national standard GOST R 54122-2010 “Safety of Machinery and Equipment. Requirements for the Justification of Safety”, which establishes its structure and content.
Therefore, according to this standard, the OB will consist of the title page, introduction, and 11 sections:
- Section 1. Basic parameters and characteristics of the equipment
- Section 2. General equipment safety principles.
- Section 3. Requirements for equipment reliability.
- Section 4. Requirements for equipment users
- Section 5. Risk analysis of equipment use.
- Section 6. Safety requirements for equipment start-up.
- Section 7. Requirements for safety management in equipment operation.
- Section 8. Requirements for quality management in equipment operation.
- Section 9. Requirements for environmental protection management during the commissioning, operation, and disposal of the equipment.
- Section 10. Requirements for the collection and analysis of safety information for the commissioning, operation, and disposal of equipment.
- Section 11. Safety requirements for equipment disposal.