Hello, I'm looking for a bit of advice regarding the use of e-stops in food manufacturing. We have large fryers that are used as part of a production line to cook pasta based products. With the current system we have inherited the situation is that if an e-stop is hit on the production line in which the fryers are located all the machines stop outright. This includes the fryer which stops operating and continues to hold the product that is cooking in it. We have concerns that this may be more of a fire risk as the product is hot and remains cooking in hot oil whilst stuck in the machinery. My understanding of the PUWER Regs is that although the e stops should rapidly bring work equipment to a halt, this must be achieved under control so as not to create any additional hazards which the trapped product will. We want to query if we can bring this hazardous equipment to a controlled stop rather than an abrupt halt, and ideally is it good practice to put in e-stops that will stop individual pieces of equipment rather than stop the whole production line?

Having worked in the Motor Industry for many years, I can think of many examples where dead stop could not have been safely achieved rapidly. You can't for example safely cut power to a foundry hot blast cupola - doing this creates another emergency requiring you to knock the bottom out of the cupola before the contents solidifies and writes off the foundry. Our foundry had to do it once when an employee tried to steal copper from site by sawing through the 11Kv supply..... (He survived!) Similarly, if you drop the power on a 100 station in-line transfer machining system, you'll smash up 100 heads and tooling, unless there's a retract operation as part of the run-down process. The ACOP on woodworking machines accepts that a 10 second run-down time is acceptable and I've heard of a big sawmill where the saw had 5 ton flywheels and blacked out the village if you started it up too quick - No chance of a 10 second run-down time there! The aim is to bring the line to a safe condition without creating more risks. If you put individual E-stops on parts of the line, will this work and not create further problems? Presumably there is some kind of controller running the line which needs to have a more sophisticated response. Dave