White Papers

Selecting Transmitters for Safety Instrumented Systems

• Tags:
• safety,
• risk,
• failure,
• causes

Overview Users design safety systems to mitigate the risk of identified process hazards within tolerable levels, using application-specific risk models, defined user inspection schedules, and safety data for the devices under consideration. Some suppliers provide safety data for their devices. However, supplier data, even when validated by a third party, reflects laboratory results, and can be an order of magnitude too aggressive for field devices. “Proven-in-use” data includes real-world failure causes; however it tends to be conservative, since it must cover the whole range of the category, from 20-year-old pneumatics to the latest smart technology. Moreover, proven-in-use data is often aggregated for a given technology: for example, “pressure transmitter = dangerous failure rate of once in 50 years”. This aggregate data often does not isolate failure causes, so it does not allow users to take credit for improvements in technology or user practices intended to minimize the impact of specific failures. The net result to the user can be over design, over-testing, increased spurious trips and needless capital expenditures.

• 
• Did you find this white paper useful?

• Subscribe to the IT White Papers Newsletter
• White Paper RSS