Functional Safety

A plant operator needs to be reassured that his or her plant will not exceed operational design specifications such that humans in proximity, the environment or equipment are endangered.

This is the chief principle behind functional safety. That if a plant or a sub-section of the plant should fail, then the functional safety system will shut down the plant in such a manner as to isolate and protect.

Consequently the IEC 61508 and 61511 standards were developed to guide functional safety system designers, maintenance engineers and end users in ensuring that Safety Instrumentation Systems will have a very high availability and reliability, and not be plagued by spurious trips and be tolerant to internal failures.

Experience

  • Made successful engineering case for replacement of Shell Dolphin top side well safety solenoids that were past useful life
  • Provided functional safety recommendations in review of PLNL ammonia plant SIL verification campaign
  • Conducted virtual FAT and developed SIS and Fire and Gas commissioning procedures for Honeywell Safety Manager for bpTT Cassia C gas compression platform
  • Developed draft SIS bypass procedure for Niquan Gas To Liquid plant
  • Implemented and removed safety bypasses on Yokogawa ProSafe SIS as per request of Niquan Commissioning and Operations teams
  • Managed functional safety lifecycle for Repsol / Perenco Teak Offshore Crude Oil Treatment Delta V SIS
  • Assisted in identifying and managing SIS incidents for bpTT Greater Mahogany and Cashima
  • Emerson Delta V SIS trained (Austin Texas)
  • Exida trained Functional Safety Professional (Certification forthcoming…)

Let Me Work With You!

If your plant requires a functional safety audit, I can either work as your plant SIS engineer or work alongside your existing functional safety team to either advise or make preparations for the audit, or help to achieve functional safety compliance post audit.

Only a Certified Functional Safety Expert is qualified to conduct functional safety audits, however I am fully capable of managing the full life cycle from design to maintenance to upgrade, incident investigation and testing of your SIS.