The paper is concerned with the application of brake mechanisms in various production equipment to provide quality of its operation, efficiency, reliability and service life, and to improve operation safety for maintenance staff, among other things, in emergency conditions. It considers design modifications of brake mechanisms for production equipment and shows advantages of friction brakes with permanent magnets. New engineering solutions were proposed to improve performance characteristics of friction brake mechanisms with permanent magnets: general layout of friction brake mechanisms with permanent magnets with branched magnetic system by means of an intermediate pole was proposed and recommendations were made on the choice of the optimal value for the air gap under this pole; new friction brake mechanism with permanent magnets with composite armature was developed to provide the maximum friction contact area between the armature and the magnet poles. An investigation was carried out to find out the influence of the unstable thermal state of the operating solenoid winding and the permanent magnet made from ferrite hard-magnetic material on the output parameters of the friction brake mechanism with permanent magnets. It was found that at the design stage, during the return spring force calculation, it should be taken into account that the minimum opening voltage in the hot state increases by approximately 35 ÷ 40%. Besides, it was shown that when calculating operating points of the permanent magnet, which are necessary to calculate the output parameters of friction brake mechanisms with permanent magnets, it is necessary to use the corresponding demagnetization curve taking into account its thermal state.