Last month we decided it was time to upgrade the old family car.  After searching for several weeks, we decided on a very nice, 3 year-old, certified pre-owned.   While I haven’t purchased a used vehicle in several years, I felt comfortable in this decision as the price was attractive, the warranty was extended, plus I had the ...

I received an e-mail inquiring about a product being “listed” or not, which made me stop and think about how far we have come in the past 10 years regarding safety systems and their “type” of certification.  The term “listed” means equipment or materials included in a list published by an organization ...

 Have you had a chance to catch Bill Goble’s Hydrocarbon Processing (October 2007 issue) editorial titled “Still not using a safety PLC?” Essentially Bill addresses the question of whether you can use conventional equipment (PLC or DCS) in compliance to ISA 84.00.01-2004 (IEC 61511 Mod.)? I think he did a nice job ...

Was not the response I was expecting to hear from an audience member during my presentation on new SIS (safety instrumented system) hardware development at this week’s ISA Expo.  He obviously was concerned over my suggestion that with new SIS technology there’s no degradation of safety when you have a partial shutdown and, ...

Sorry for my absence (for those actually missed me).  I promise, after I get back from my family vacation July 25th, I promise to be more consistent with weekly blog entries after my vacation.  I’ve been saving up some very good material, and I’m sure you’ll find these thought provoking. I've been debating for ...

A while back I had an interesting conversation with a well respected burner management (BMS) expert, Mr. Mike Scott from AESolutions.  We were chatting about the requirements for PLC based BMS systems, and what the latest release of NFPA standards (NFPA 85 and NFPA 86) mandate.Something that we found quite interesting was with NFPA 86 -2007 - ...

The cover story of the April edition of Automation World was titled “how much integration is right”.  Of course they were covering the highly controversial topic of integrating your control and safety system.  Many globally recognized experts were quoted in the article, but to spare you the time, please allow me to ...

A recent “Market Intelligence” report on Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) had me shaking my head.  What really surprised me about their reported findings was on the heavily debated topic of SIS independence.  For those who like reading my BLOG, but are not (yet) process safety gurus, please allow me to explain.  For the ...

Like most of you, I’m always interested (yet skeptical) hearing about new trends in our industry.  Earlier this week, I had the privilege to co-present at a process safety technical conference in the Pittsburgh area, with Dr. William (Bill) Goble of Exida.  Bill enlightened the entire group of some 20 process control engineers ...

Recently I got caught up in a reliability discussion between a user and a vendor.  The user worked for a large O&G company, and the vendor worked for a large company who manufactured process instrumentation.  In this particular exchange, the user was interested in the vendor’s safety shut off valve package.  While acting ...