A developing engineer must overcome a number of challenges when designing a technical system with built-in safety functions. One of the challenges is the basic bottom-level safety functions that connect the technical system with the physical world like e.g. current and voltage measuring and circuit breaking.
The high-level safety functions (e.g. internlocking and traffic rules) in the technical system rely on the bottom-level functions.
The bottom-level functions need a solid ground to rely on in order to be safe, often is the safety design based on an inherited component characteristic defined in e.g. EN 50129, appendix C, which again is based on physical laws.
By using this method the low-level safety functions achieves a safety level high enough to be named 'fail-safe' and trustable under all failure conditions: No matter what happens of internal component errors, external overvoltage's from lightning, mechanical wear, salty sea fog etc., - the low-level safety function will not 'lie' to the high-level safety functions.
Current measuring, may not erroneously measure the current, IMEAS = 0, while the physically current in the circuit IPH > 0.
A developer of a high-level technical Railway system like e.g. Train computer, Interlocking system Level Crossing Controller or Point Controller can implement the presented ammeter as a low-level fail-safe component in the technical Railway system and save many developing hours.
Hereby, there are freed resources that can focus on the functionality of the high-level safety functions.
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