Safety engineering is an engineering discipline which assures that engineered systems provide acceptable levels of safety. It is strongly related to industrial engineering/systems engineering, and the subset system safety engineering. Safety engineering assures that a life-critical system behaves as needed, even when components fail.
A piping and instrumentation diagram is a detailed diagram in the process industry which shows the piping and process equipment together with the instrumentation and control devices.
In functional safety, safety integrity level (SIL) is defined as the relative level of risk-reduction provided by a safety instrumented function (SIF), i.e. the measurement of the performance required of the SIF.
IEC 61508 is an international standard published by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) consisting of methods on how to apply, design, deploy and maintain automatic protection systems called safety-related systems. It is titled Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems.
IEC standard 61511 is a technical standard which sets out practices in the engineering of systems that ensure the safety of an industrial process through the use of instrumentation. Such systems are referred to as Safety Instrumented Systems. The title of the standard is "Functional safety - Safety instrumented systems for the process industry sector".
In functional safety a safety instrumented system (SIS) is an engineered set of hardware and software controls which provides a protection layer that shuts down a chemical, nuclear, electrical, or mechanical system, or part of it, if a hazardous condition is detected.
Standardization in oil industry seeks to promote a better standardization within the oil and energy industry. It promotes this objective by highlighting areas where standardization has worked well, where it has not, and why. This provokes discussions for better standardization. The overall purpose of the document is to issue a guideline on the application of IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 in the Norwegian Petroleum Industry, and thereby simplify the use of the standards.
A shutdown valve is an actuated valve designed to stop the flow of a hazardous fluid upon the detection of a dangerous event. This provides protection against possible harm to people, equipment or the environment. Shutdown valves form part of a safety instrumented system. The process of providing automated safety protection upon the detection of a hazardous event is called functional safety.
Spurious trip level (STL) is defined as a discrete level for specifying the spurious trip requirements of safety functions to be allocated to safety systems. An STL of 1 means that this safety function has the highest level of spurious trips. The higher the STL level the lower the number of spurious trips caused by the safety system. There is no limit to the number of spurious trip levels.
Functional safety is the part of the overall safety of a system or piece of equipment that depends on automatic protection operating correctly in response to its inputs or failure in a predictable manner (fail-safe). The automatic protection system should be designed to properly handle likely human errors, systematic errors, hardware failures and operational/environmental stress.
A process plant shutdown system is a functional safety countermeasure crucial in any hazardous process plant such as oil and gas production plants and oil refineries. The concept also applies to non-process facilities such as nuclear plants. These systems are used to protect people, assets, and the environment when process conditions get out of the safe design envelope the equipment was designed for.
Instrumentation is used to monitor and control the process plant in the oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Instrumentation ensures that the plant operates within defined parameters to produce materials of consistent quality and within the required specifications. It also ensures that the plant is operated safely and acts to correct out of tolerance operation and to automatically shut down the plant to prevent hazardous conditions from occurring. Instrumentation comprises sensor elements, signal transmitters, controllers, indicators and alarms, actuated valves, logic circuits and operator interfaces.
ISO 26262, titled "Road vehicles – Functional safety", is an international standard for functional safety of electrical and/or electronic systems that are installed in serial production road vehicles, defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2011, and revised in 2018.
Partial stroke testing is a technique used in a control system to allow the user to test a percentage of the possible failure modes of a shut down valve without the need to physically close the valve. PST is used to assist in determining that the safety function will operate on demand. PST is most often used on high integrity emergency shutdown valves (ESDVs) in applications where closing the valve will have a high cost burden yet proving the integrity of the valve is essential to maintaining a safe facility. In addition to ESDVs PST is also used on high integrity pressure protection systems or HIPPS. Partial stroke testing is not a replacement for the need to fully stroke valves as proof testing is still a mandatory requirement.
IEC/EN 62061, ”Safety of machinery: Functional safety of electrical, electronic and programmable electronic control systems”, is the machinery specific implementation of IEC/EN 61508. It provides requirements that are applicable to the system level design of all types of machinery safety-related electrical control systems and also for the design of non-complex subsystems or devices.
Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) is a risk classification scheme defined by the ISO 26262 - Functional Safety for Road Vehicles standard. This is an adaptation of the Safety Integrity Level (SIL) used in IEC 61508 for the automotive industry. This classification helps defining the safety requirements necessary to be in line with the ISO 26262 standard. The ASIL is established by performing a risk analysis of a potential hazard by looking at the Severity, Exposure and Controllability of the vehicle operating scenario. The safety goal for that hazard in turn carries the ASIL requirements.
Hercules is a line of ARM architecture-based microcontrollers from Texas Instruments built around one or more ARM Cortex cores. This "Hercules safety microcontroller platform" includes a series of microcontrollers specifically targeted for Functional Safety applications, through such hardware-base fault correction/detection features as dual cores that can run in lock-step, full path ECC, automated self testing of memory and logic, peripheral redundancy, and monitor/checker cores.
IEC 84.00.07 is a technical report developed by the ISA 84 standards panel. It defines the lifecycle and technical requirements for ensuring effective design of fire and gas detection systems for use in the process industries. The technical report provides a lifecycle for performance based design of fire and gas detection systems, listing out the steps involved in a performance based design and establishing requirements to be implemented for each step. The technical report also defines performance metrics for application to fire and gas detection systems. The performance metrics established in this report for fire and gas system effectiveness include coverage and safety availability.
Lean air is a gas mixture with an oxygen content lower than 20.95%. Lean air is made from a gas mixture of air with nitrogen or of pure oxygen with nitrogen and is used in several production processes where a product covering with pure nitrogen can be dangerous, undesirable or more expensive. In some production processes the oxygen content is necessary for the reaction process or during storage.
