During a recent exida webinar we received the following question:

We tend to see more failures with actuated valves, than what manufacturers published failure rates would indicate! Any reason?

There are several reasons. Some manufacturers publish data based on field return data where they classify failures caused by customers as “not a failure” and delete those failures from the analysis even though they were real failures and certainly may occur again. Combine that with the fact that many equipment failures are not reported to the manufacturer and do not get counted. Some manufacturers publish low failure rate data based on cycle testing in a lab where conditions are quite nice and not at all the same as your installation. There are many other reasons. But one thing for sure, please compare any published data with www.SILSafeData.com. If the dangerous failure rate is below the lower bound it will not give you any result that is realistic.