Last week, about 40 process safety enthusiasts attended the spring 2008 S84 meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The main committee meeting generally consists on brief updates on the individual working groups and the maintenance of the current ANSI/ISA S84.00.01 (IEC 61511 modified).

A couple topics that I thought were pretty interesting were the discussion on ongoing hardware fault tolerance requirements.  I’ve blogged on this before and there’s some obvious concern over products that are reaching the market today claiming to have SIL 3 capabilities with no redundancy.  I still think there is much confusion on this as one well respected end-user noted there dissatisfaction while trying a “new” transmitter claiming to provide high SIL levels, but caused them lot’s of problems with nuisance trips. 
I still get aggravated with the misconception of safety and spurious trip rate.   They are separate and have to be treated as such.

I’ll be the first person to say “yes, my company develops SIL 3 certified, non-redundant products, that will most likely have a higher spurious trip rate than a non-redundant, non-SIL certified device.”  The ONLY way to combat the spurious trips is to add redundancy.

The other topic that puzzled me was the inaccurate statement made regarding the status of safety fieldbus.  Again, it was erroneously stated that there was no safety fieldbus today for the process industries.  Luckily, there were a few “informed” safety experts in the room that noted the existence of PROFISAFE and ASI-safe.  I guess some people are still confused since FF-safety, has yet to be approved or released for safety communications.

I spent the rest of the meetings involved in Fire & Gas working group going over comments on the last draft we issued.