The adoption of the functional safety standards continues to gain momentum in turbine applications. Both industrial and power turbine sites are now requiring compliance to IEC 61511. This blog will review both technical requirements and market trends related to functional safety system design. Market trends will cover which standards…
exida explains Blog
Entries tagged with: IEC 61511
- by Chris O'Brien, CFSE
- Tuesday, November 03, 2015
- Functional Safety
Best Practices in Achieving Functional Safety in Turbine Applications - Part 2
- by Chris O'Brien, CFSE
- Thursday, January 07, 2016
- Certification
Best Practices in Achieving Functional Safety in Turbine Applications - Part 3
The adoption of the functional safety standards continues to gain momentum in turbine applications. Both industrial and power turbine sites are now requiring compliance to IEC 61511. This blog will review both technical requirements and market trends related to functional safety system design. Market trends will cover which standards…
- by Jim Jenkins
- Thursday, July 19, 2018
- Functional Safety
Burner Management Systems (BMS) and IEC 61511
Prescriptive BMS standards contain a wealth of knowledge on combustion hazards, unit sequence of operation, and the equipment configuration required for combustion safeguards and combustion control. This experience cannot be overlooked; there is just not a Safety Lifecycle to tie in the Functional Safety Management of the BMS.
That…
- by John Yozallinas, CFSE
- Tuesday, August 18, 2015
- Certification
Certification and the Environmental Test
Functional Safety Assessments (FSA) focus on the relevant functional safety standards that are to be applied to a product in the appropriate industry. These are standards such as IEC 61511 in the process automation industry, or ISO 26262 in the automotive industry. And IEC 61508 is like an umbrella…
- by Ted Stewart, CFSP, exidaCSP
- Friday, January 30, 2015
- Certification
CFSE/CFSP: Why and How to Become One
As an engineer responsible for critical industrial processes, we face a variety of challenges:
- coping with new and changing standards
- increased pressures for process uptime and plant safety
- a growing list of responsibilities
- decreased availability of support personnel
This makes…
- by Steve Gandy, CFSP
- Thursday, February 24, 2022
- Functional Safety
Competency and IEC61511
Many of you who follow exida’s blogs and webinars will know that we often talk about the requirement for competency. In fact, the 2016 edition of IEC61511 specifically addresses competency in more detail now than the 2003 version. The strong emphasis on competency is because the IEC61511 committee recognized that…
- by John Yozallinas, CFSE
- Thursday, August 02, 2018
- Certification
Do you know your Site Safety Index?
There’s a lot that exida does behind the scenes to advance the industry and benefit you. We try to make sense of data that we collect and put it to good use. One thing we found is that human activities play a role in functional safety, often causing the intended safety performance…
- by Steve Gandy, CFSP
- Thursday, May 31, 2018
- Functional Safety
Do You Measure the Performance of Your SIS?
It always amazes me that when teaching our FSE 100 Functional Safety Engineering course, the number of times I find that end users in the class are not really measuring the performance of their SIS. In most cases, they are doing some measurements, but not thoroughly.
It…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Thursday, May 17, 2018
- Functional Safety
Does Everyone Really Ignore Failure Rates?
While discussing functional safety certification of an integrated valve assembly with a manufacturer, exida stated that all devices (actuator, pneumatic parts, valve, etc.) must be IEC 61508 certified. The manufacturer said this was no problem, and provided a set of exida and TÜV certificates.
Of…
- by Dr. Eric Scharpf, CFSE
- Tuesday, May 28, 2019
- Functional Safety
Duty of Care (Too Good to Be True Failure Rate Data)
I have received several calls lately to our Australia / New Zealand office about whether it is acceptable to use published failure rates that seem too good to be true.
The person calling is usually doing a SIL verification calculation for an operating plant or for an…
- by Iwan van Beurden, CFSE
- Thursday, March 15, 2018
- Functional Safety
Fake Fact: Final Elements should not be included in SIF evaluation
Ehh… If your safety action is stopping flow/closing a valve, how are you going to accomplish this if you consider that the remote actuated valve is not part of your SIF ?
So, what is this myth based on? The title of IEC 61508 reads “Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable…
- by Iwan van Beurden, CFSE
- Thursday, May 10, 2018
- Functional Safety
Fake Fact: IEC 61508 Does Not Affect Me As an End User
Though this is largely true, I want to discourage people from completely ignoring the good things that IEC 61508 does for the end user.
IEC 61511 is the process industry functional safety standard derived from IEC 61508. In the very first section of IEC 61511 (“Scope”), the standard describes…
- by Chris O'Brien, CFSE
- Thursday, March 29, 2018
- Certification
Functional Safety Assessment of Valve Assemblies (Part 1)
In this blog series, I will cover the emerging trends in the valve assembly market, how these trends relate to the IEC 61511 requirements, and what's in a final element. When you look at the different devices that go into some of these safety systems, the final element becomes…
- by Chris O'Brien, CFSE
- Thursday, June 07, 2018
- Functional Safety
Functional Safety Assessment of Valve Assemblies (Part 2)
In Part 1, I covered the emerging trends in the valve assembly market, how these trends relate to IEC 61511 requirements, and the anatomy of final elements.
Now let’s discuss why we need to show requirements traceability down through the design of the safety instrumented function and then…
- by Chris O'Brien, CFSE
- Friday, September 07, 2018
- Functional Safety
Functional Safety Assessment of Valve Assemblies (Part 3)
In Part 1, we covered the emerging trends in the valve assembly market, how these trends relate to IEC 61511 requirements, and the anatomy of final elements. In Part 2, we discussed the need to show requirements traceability down through the design of the safety instrumented function…
- by Steve Gandy, CFSP
- Thursday, August 18, 2022
- Functional Safety
Functional Safety Assessments – Why Aren’t They Being Done?
It’s an interesting fact that many end users and engineering companies that I’ve talked to have not or do not undertake Functional Safety Assessments (FSAs). Why is this? My view is that many do not realize and/or understand the true purpose of and benefit of performing FSAs. The IEC61511 standard identifies 5…
- by John Yozallinas, CFSE
- Tuesday, March 07, 2017
- Functional Safety
Functional Safety Standards - IEC 61508 vs. IEC 61511
IEC 61508 is considered a basic or “umbrella” standard for functional safety. It is generic and sometimes even vague. IEC 61508 was intended that various industry sectors provide their own specific standards and guidelines as needed. Here we can see the relationship between 61508 and other standards, such as…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Friday, January 10, 2014
- Certification
Functional Safety, Cybersecurity, and Alarm Management in 2013
2013 was a good year for functional safety progress. exida Certification issued a record number of new product functional safety certifications in mostly every product category - valves, actuators, solenoid valves, PLCs, fire and gas sensors, process sensors, and components. The component category is one of the most…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Monday, June 01, 2015
- Functional Safety
Getting Realistic Failure Rate Data - Part 1
Over the course of several blogs , I will talk about getting realistic failure rate data, where this failure data comes from, and how different methods of failure data analysis compare. I think if you understand this, you will begin to get a very good feel of what it…
- by Dr. William Goble, CFSE
- Thursday, July 09, 2015
- Functional Safety
Getting Realistic Failure Rate Data - Part 4
Over the course of several blogs , I will talk about getting realistic failure rate data, where this failure data comes from, and how different methods of failure data analysis compare. I think if you understand this, you will begin to get a very good feel of what it…
