Functional Safety In Process Control Systems

Safety instrumented systems (SISs) are critical in process control to achieve safety and productivity. The primary aim of SIS is to take a process to a safe state when predetermined set points are exceeded. SISs are have been called emergency shutdown systems, safety shutdown systems, and safety interlock systems.

Several standards have been formalized to address the reliability of SISs. IEC 61508 and ISA /IEC 61511 are two well accepted standards being followed by leading product manufacturers and leading end users in small to large process industries encompassing Chemicals, Oil refining, Oil & Gas production, Non-nuclear Power generation etc.

All processes carry risk of small or big level to harm humans, environment or property. The safety engineering knowledge of above standards has a tremendous potential to reduce the risk of an identified safety instrumented function (SIF) by design of SIS to deliver the performance level of SIL1 / SIL 2 / SIL 3 in a systematic & most cost effective way to a tolerable level.

Government regulatory (OSHA/EPA), HSE-UK, & Seveso Directive -II in countries like the United States, UK, Europe considers these standards as “good engineering practices” for compliance to process safety management by law / act. This seminar is designed to be an awareness program on SIS-SIF-SIL for an individual industry / institution operating where risk of an accident is a matter of time!

• SIS – Safety Instrumented System
• SIF – Safety Instrumented Function
• SIL – Safety Integrity Level