Everybody talks about it functional safety and SIL and how important it is. Still, the shocking truth is that over 90% of al safety functions worldwide are not functionally safe and are not SIL compliant. Why is that?

Many manufacturers of mechanical devices (valves, actuators, etc.) claim that their devices can be used in SIL 3 applications. This post will explain that most mechanical devices will never achieve SIL 3.

End users must prove that their safety functions are working to ensure they still work as specified. How often do they need to proof test?

A common question in the process industry is whether operators can be part of safety instrumented functions? The answer is yes.

Reviewing and assessing HIPPS documentation for SIL compliance is not the favourite task of any engineer. Yet, I learned some valuable lessons from it on our recent project that I want to share with you.

There are many tank farms around the world. You would think those tank farm operators would, from a business point of view, not be interested in overfilling a tank. How is is that good for business? Yet, today, many tank farms still have very poor tank-level management systems and procedures in place. They are not in a position to manage overfilling properly and in a safe manner.

Is HFT (hardware fault tolerance) equal to redundancy? This article demystifies the confusion.

Risknowlogy®, a leading provider of services, consulting, training and certification in the field of risk, reliability, and safety announced today a new safety system metric that can be used for safety functions and systems that need to comply with IEC 61508, IEC 61511 and related functional safety standards. The new metric is called Spurious Trip Level™ and can be used by end-users, system integrators and product developers to classify the performance of safety devices, functions and systems. The Spurious Trip Level™ is particular important for end-users as they can measure how much asset protection is achieved with the designed safety system.