Product Safety

Circuit spacing is a key element in minimizing electrical shock and fire risks, which is critical for safe product development. This publication provides simplified guidelines to help understand, navigate, interpret, and apply circuit spacings, contributing to a successful safety and certification experience.

Recalls can create huge problems for manufacturers and product sellers. They can generate new product liability lawsuits that are harder to defend, involve a significant financial cost to implement, and create reputational problems with consumers and retailers. Manufacturers must carefully design a recall or other corrective action that is as effective as possible and adequate under the circumstances. Various government entities are issuing new requirements that can help with these efforts.

This two-part article provides a detailed overview of hardware compliance issues applicable to mainframe and server computers and their subcomponents.

The world of non-food consumer products has undergone significant changes over the past two decades. New technologies and online sales are the primary drivers behind the upcoming new Product Safety law.

This article presents methods for building reduced-order models (ROMs) based on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) for modeling transient heat transfer in partially-perfuse tissue in prolonged contact with a heat-generating wearable device.

Even though warnings and instructions are not followed by all product users, they are important for product safety and product liability defensibility. Manufacturers must decide how safe to design their products and when they can also rely on warnings and instructions to make the product safe.

Manufacturers need to understand their legal responsibilities when analyzing post-sale incidents, injuries, and lawsuits so they can argue that they met their statutory reporting responsibilities.

Manufacturers should understand product liability law and consider it pre-sale when they design and manufacture their products and after sale when they deal with potential product safety problems reported to them by consumers. Doing so will result in safer products and, if there is a lawsuit, a better defense.

Recalls are a major contributor to product liability incidents and lawsuits, interactions with government safety agencies, disputes with suppliers and product sellers, and negative publicity with the buying public. New guides have recently been issued that can help a manufacturer and product seller to better understand how to prepare for and implement an effective recall.

While the selection of components in electrical equipment plays a crucial role, a sound understanding of the characteristics of safety-critical and high-integrity components can provide valuable information about the ways to advance and achieve the safety goals.