News & Events.
exida Presenting and Exhibiting at the 20th Annual International Symposium
October 11, 2017
exida will be presenting and exhibiting at the 20th Annual International Symposium . The 2017 International Symposium, in association with IChemE, will be held at the College Station Hilton Conference Center on October 24-26, 2017.
The symposium serves as the crossroads for process safety where industry, academia, government agencies and other stakeholders come together to discuss critical issues of research in process safety. Experts from around the world will gather to share the latest information on the hottest topics aimed at making the process industry a safer place.
exida Product Manager Kate Hildenbrandt will be presenting a paper entitled Reducing Project Lifecycle Cost with an Integrated Safety Lifecycle Suite at 10 AM on Thursday October 26, 2017.
Reducing Project Lifecycle Cost with an Integrated Safety Lifecycle Suite
The international functional safety standard IEC 61511 provides the safety lifecycle as a steadfast guideline to assess and mitigate risk for manufacturing processes including refineries, chemical, petrochemical, pulp and paper, and power plants. To achieve a functionally safe system, it is essential to follow each requirement in the standard. However, consistent execution is difficult to achieve and often depends on the tools used to perform analysis and specification of the safety instrumented system. The need for a consistent work process was fulfilled with a fully integrated safety lifecycle software suite. Lifecycle tools often include a module for each stage of the safety lifecycle. Use of the full suite ensures quality assessment and execution of a safety instrumented system, as well as compliance to the safety standard. An integrated tool would also streamline these tasks, easily transferring data from one module to another to save the user time and money.
In this paper, the benefit of using an integrated safety lifecycle tool versus use of excel spreadsheets or other in-house tools is quantified. The intent is to show how users of the software reduce the number of engineering hours, and therefore dollars spent, for each safety lifecycle task. It is assumed that all required information is available when needed. Through conservative estimates, this paper proves that it pays to use an integrated tool to support your safety lifecycle tasks and to make safety a priority.
exida Senior Safety Engineer Denise Chastain-Knight will be presenting a paper entitled Functional Safety Management Planning at 10 AM on Tuesday October 2, 2017
Functional Safety Management Planning
Successful implementation of the Functional Safety standards, IEC-61508 and IEC-61511 (or ANSI/ISA 84), begins with robust management planning. The Functional Safety Lifecycle includes activities at all stages of a process lifespan, including conception of a project, hazards identification, specification, design and implementation, verification and validation, operation and maintenance, and modification and decommissioning. Each phase of the lifecycle has specific requirements for the activities that must be completed, goals to be achieved by those activities and expectations of the documentation. The standards are performance based, so for a turnkey project, the path to compliance is defined by the project engineering management firm. A written Functional Safety Management Plan (FSMP) defines the desired path and success metrics to ensure functional safety objectives are met at all stages of the lifecycle. This paper will review the requirements for functional safety management planning, and share the experiences of one large capital project where the lifecycle planning and execution failed expectations.