Does your safety development process have a split personality? Do you “talk-the-talk but not walk-the-walk?” When crunch time comes for project completion, does the mantra “whatever it takes” matter more than following the process? Does your process peel away at the seams?
Getting buy-in to a rigorous process for…
Most engineers who design and verify safety instrumented functions (SIFs) understand how hard it is to design a manual proof test with high effectiveness (also called high proof test coverage). Those folks who understand that a proof test is not likely to detect all failures never use simplified equations…
In honor of the upcoming “Talk Like a Pirate” Day on September 19, I offer this lighthearted look at PIU assessment.
Captain (C)
“Ahoy me bucko! We be attemptin’ to get our transmitter design certified. It’s been shippin’ fer a few years now. We don’t got a…
Alarms were originally shown on Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams / Drawings (P&IDs) to document hardware requirements for installation in a (panelboard) control room. This was important because there was limited real estate in the control room for the alarms (displayed on Panalarms and light boxes) and there was a…
Have a formal process for tracking, recording, and classifying field shipments and failure returns.
If your product was designed well in the first place, even if strict adherence to IEC 61508 was not followed, your field failure rate should be pretty low.
Using Proven-In-Use (PIU) methodology will…
I was reading an incident report on the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) website the other day, where it was the conclusion of the reviewing team that the incident (which sadly resulted in a loss of life) was the direct result of a poor safety culture across the…
A manufacturer whose product passes the exida IEC 61508 Assessment Scheme will receive a certificate based on IEC 61508 and perhaps other functional safety standards. There is a significant amount of information on a certificate that may not be always trivial for a novice. This document explains how one…
Those operating in the process world should be familiar with the concept of Functional Safety Management (FSM) and the need to have well defined processes and procedures in place. Otherwise, how else will they be able to ensure that their Safety Instrumented System (SIS) and plant…
Functional Safety and Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) may not often be used in the same sentence. But EMI is just one of the environmental stresses that can stop a system from performing its safety function. It is important for a functional safety system to be immune from the EMI levels…
I consistently find that with companies who are new to functional safety development, the SW process is not as structured or mature as the HW process. SW development is often more informal, and subject to the interpretation of one or more SW developers. But when project delays occur, it’s…
Do you have World Cup Fever? Well I do. Especially after the Netherlands (Holland) beat Spain 5-1 on Friday. I wished that was the score last time they played. So what does this have to do with failure rates? Sometimes my mind works in odd ways. While driving home…
As an end-user, do you know how reliable and safe your Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) and Basic Process Control Systems (BPCS) are from potential cyber issues? Do you rely on your vendor statements regarding the robustness of their products? If the answer to these questions is “don’t know”…
At least I do. Sometimes I wonder how I could forget certain things. Maybe it’s age? Maybe it’s information overload? It’s always apparent when I get ready to go on vacation. You’ve probably been in the same situation… arriving at your destination only to find that the one thing…
Most of you know that exida gathers field failure data from many sources including manufacturers’ warranty return data and end user maintenance/failure records. At this point we have nearly 100 billion unit operating hours of data. This is probably the largest process industry data set in the world. And…
It’s very interesting to me to find that people are still using excel to do PFD calculations. Whereas this is probably okay for simple single element architectures (i.e. single sensor, single logic solver and single final element), it becomes extremely complicated when dealing with redundant architectures. Moreover, for performing…