Emerson's Mike Boudreaux alerted me to a discussion in the Oil and Gas Instrumentation Club LinkedIn group. The thread referenced an earlier post on this blog, Field Device Sharing Between Control and Safety Systems that Mike had written. Mike quoted Emerson certified...
safety instrumented system
Additional Clarifications on Digital Valve Controllers in Safety Applications
A few months ago, I attempted to clear up some misconceptions about the use of digital valve controllers in safety applications in a post, Clarifications on the Use of the DVC6000 SIS in Safety Applications. It addressed misconceptions about references to the obsolete...
Centralized, Distributed, and Hybrid Safety Instrumented Systems
Emerson's Mike Boudreaux alerted me to a great article comparing safety instrumented system architectures. The ISA InTech article, Centralized or distributed process safety compares and contrasts centralized, distributed, and hybrid safety systems. Centralized systems...
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...
Clear and Concise Safety Requirements Specifications
Update and bump: Here is the link to Andy's paper, The importance of a clear Safety Requirements Specification as part of the overall Safety Lifecycle, which is now posted. Original May 2011 post: Emerson's Andy Crosland, a process safety expert, will be presenting a...
Performance Without Compromise Seminars
Across the Asia-Pacific region, a series of Performance Without Compromise seminars have occurred over the past several years. The name of the seminar series comes from former Emerson CEO Chuck Knight's 2005 book, Performance Without Compromise: How Emerson...
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...
Avoiding Flameout and Shutdown in Burner Management Applications
Furnaces, fired heaters, boilers and other process units requiring burners to manage are common across many process industries such as refining, chemicals, petrochemicals, and power. Recognizing and reacting to flame instability is critical since a flameout condition...
Control Valves in Process Safety Applications
Update and bump: I received great news from Riyaz that the ISA Kuwait section has agreed to let us upload and link to their December 2009 newsletter containing Riyaz's article, When is a Safety Integrity Level (SIL) Rating of a Valve Required? I'd like to thank 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....
Modernizing Burner Management Systems
The Industrial Safety and Security Source blog has a post, Firing Up Burner System, which describes the implementation of a burner management system (BMS) at RockTenn's recycled paper mill in St. Paul, Minnesota. Their challenge was to replace an old relay panel-based...
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