Safety is consistently among the highest priorities for manufacturers and producers. Critical goals are to avoid safety incidents, keep site personnel safe, protect the community around you, protect the environment as a whole, and improve your corporate financial health. A robust safety culture has many facets, including occupational safety, containment safety, process safety, and functional safety.
functional safety
Remote Proof-Testing of Level Measurement Devices Supports Safer Tank Operations
Storage tanks containing hazardous materials require safety instrumented systems (SIS) to prevent overfills. Digital technology in the latest level measurement devices used in SIS enables them to be proof-tested remotely, which provides significant advantages. The...
Understanding Functional Safety Concepts and Final Element Suitability
The world of functional safety has its own tribal language and acronyms, e.g. safety instrumented systems (SISs), safety instrumented functions (SIFs), logic solvers, final elements (FEs), safety integrity level (SIL), probability of failure on demand (PFD), etc. In a...
Integrated versus Separate Control and Safety
Panelists at a session at the 2019 ARC Industry Forum, Safety Systems: Integrated versus Not? Does It Really Matter?, set out to discuss the pros and cons of the approaches and how they accommodate different risk factors. ARC Advisory Group's Mark Sen Gupta moderated...
Embracing Safety Requirements Specifications
The Institute of Measurement and Control is hosting the Functional Safety 2016 conference this week in London. This conference seeks to engage practitioners from a wide variety of industrial sectors who have responsibilities in any functional safety lifecycle phase to...
Improving Process Safety without a Calculator
If you're not fluent in Polish, you may have missed a recent Automatyka article, Bezpieczeństwo funkcjonalne zgodne z normami [Functional Safety Compliance]. Emerson's Andy Crosland and Ryszard Boroń wrote it and provided me an English translation of the article so...
10 Ways to Improve Functional Safety
ISA Portugal recently hosted a conference on functional safety. Emerson's Russell Cockman, whom you may recall from earlier safety-related posts, presented 10 ways to improve functional safety without worrying where to put the decimal point in the calculation. From...
Clarifications on the Use of the DVC6000 SIS in Safety Applications
I had the chance to catch up with Emerson's Riyaz Ali at the Emerson Exchange last month in Nashville. You may recall Riyaz from many process safety-related posts. In his conversations with process automation and safety professionals, he has been encountering some...
Roundup of Process Safety Thoughts and Ideas
As we did with the recent energy efficiency post, I wanted to highlight a few key points made in past IEC 61511 safety lifecycle-related posts. This global safety standard provides a performance-based methodology to plan and execute your process safety efforts through...
Adopting the IEC 61511 Safety Lifecycle Standard
I saw a great article from exida's Dr. Peter Clarke, Setting the Standard, on how process plants can benefit through proper and careful adoption of the IEC 61511 global safety standard. It's perhaps the best primer I've seen in a while on the safety lifecycle and the...
Ways to Build Process Safety Competency
An important topic we touched on in an earlier post was process safety competency. The post, Developing Safety Competency, noted the importance of people involved in the safety lifecycle who must be competent in the areas of this lifecycle in which they interact....
Functional Safety, a SIF-Based Approach, and Burner Management
Earlier this week, Emerson's Chuck Miller and Mike Boudreaux were at the ChemInnovations 2010 conference in Houston, Texas. During this session, presenters talked about topics related to safety and security for instrumentation, automation, and control in the chemical...
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The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the authors. Content published here is not read or approved by Emerson before it is posted and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Emerson.