When current Certified Functional Safety Professionals and Experts (CFSP/CFSEs) come to us seeking further education, we commonly point them to the recently established CFSE Endorsement Program. However, we are often posed questions in return:
In a marketplace where many of buyers of firmly committed to “proven in use,” many projects are still using 30 year-old logic solver designs. Proven in use is a valuable concept especially for field equipment where it is hard to evaluate how well a product design will…
It’s an interesting question and one I asked myself. For any engineer and/or professional working in the controls business or process industries where safety-related equipment is required, it is essential (per IEC61511-1 Clause 5.2.2: Organization and Resources) to prove competency to carry out any safety-lifecycle activities. So what does…
Oh Really?
It must have been the week of the Proof Test Coverage (PTC) questions. In the latest marketing wars between vendors, the Proof Test Coverage has been used as a weapon. Who would have ever thought about using Proof Test Coverage to show that product A…
I have run into this question a couple of times now and though the answer is somewhat straightforward, some customers have trouble wrapping their head around this without a clear example. So here we go…
First of all we need to keep in mind that the objective of a…
Pressure can be good. It creates diamonds, right? It can help us focus; may move us to learn something new. It can help reduce procrastination. However pressure can quickly turn into a bad thing if it causes us to skip important process steps or to force a release because…
Since the announcement of the 1st Annual exida Safety Awards program a few weeks ago I have received a few questions and a challenge. The questions from manufacturers mainly focused on how to enter their product and what is the…
The V-model is a lifecycle model useful in the product development process that shows the link between the test specifications at each phase of development. Simply put, it looks like this:
The name comes from the basic shape of the model. …
Part 1 of this blog entry discussed software modeling, modeling notation, and modeling tools. But, what does this have to do with Functional Safety? The IEC 61508 standard has requirements, for certain SIL levels, regarding the use of:
Mechanical CAD and electronic schematic capture tools have been around much longer than graphical software tools. This is primarily because physical objects are more naturally represented as components in a computer-aided design program, and it was more obvious how to design those technologies at the time. The “soft” in…
A question was posed to me this week about why the OREDA failure rate for a solenoid valve was greater than the Failure Modes, Effects, and Diagnostic Analysis (FMEDA) results from exida for a specific manufacturer’s solenoid valve. The person asking the question was clearly challenging the exida…
Todd Stauffer, Director of Alarm Management at exida, takes you through a key part of the Alarm Rationalization process called Alarm Objective Analysis (AOA).
You will learn how to determine what alarms you need (and which one’s you don’t), how to eliminate nuisance alarms, and safely reduce the number…
Look at the picture. What do you see? I see a spring return actuator with
What are the high level potential failures for a ball valve?
Look at the photo. What do you see? I see a ball valve with:
What are the high level potential failures for a ball valve?
ICS cybersecurity standards such as ISA 62443 (formerly ISA 99) and NERC CIP require operators to have policies and procedures in place to monitor and maintain their critical ICS cyber assets. For anything other than very small systems, the obvious choice is to implement systems…