Functional Safety Assessment may be a dry topic even at the best of times, so much so that I took it as a personal challenge to try and write a paper about it!
The paper highlights experiences from several different projects and concludes with some simple recommendations to save time, money and mistakes.
The paper featured at the IChemE Hazards 29 conference, which took place in late May 2019.
Paper Abstract
The full Paper was delivered on Thursday 23rd May 2019 at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, UK.
Given that the process industry now has more than fifteen years of experience with the functional safety life-cycle, it is not unreasonable to expect that there have been some improvements in the specification, design, testing, operation, maintenance and modification of Safety Integrity Level (SIL) rated safety systems.
There are, however, significant challenges in demonstrating conformance with functional safety standards for the design and testing of new safety systems, and even greater challenges for existing safety systems which require modification. Independent functional safety assessment and functional safety audit should highlight when non-conformances are occurring.
This paper will seek to describe some of the challenges that were witnessed at first-hand during functional safety assessments, functional safety audits, and in general during projects involving Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) during the past ten to fifteen years.
It is hoped that by sharing experiences of real-world functional safety assessment and audit non-conformances, duty holders, engineering service companies and equipment suppliers will be able to learn how to avoid costly re-work and potentially dangerous weak-link designs.
Download the full paper here
Safety Instrumented System Functional Safety Assessment Experiences - by Jon Keswick, CFSE
About the Conference
Europe's largest annual process safety conference last took place on 22 to 24 May, 2019 at the International Convention Centre in Birmingham, UK.
The conference covers every major aspect of process safety and brings together hundreds of practitioners from around the globe. It's the perfect place to learn from others' experiences, keep up-to-date with good process safety practice, and network with the international process safety community.