The question of whether companies follow good site safety practices is an interesting one. Firstly, what do we mean by good site safety practices? I think most companies believe they follow good site safety practices but do they really? Are they really measuring and tracking this?
The basis of having good site…
A.K.A You’re About to Severely Under-Design your SIF and Put your People at Risk. Twice this week alone, and much more often than I like to remember, I’ve had safety system designers blindly follow certificates that contain data that simply cannot be true. They get a certificate from…
This is an intriguing question. One that I often ask my classes when I’m teaching our FSE100 Functional Safety course. Very often, they do not know or do not fully understand what this means and why it is important.
The IEC61511 standard requires that any failures that occur within the…
There seems to be a bunch of confusion surrounding systematic capability and random capability. I will try to clear up the confusion by explaining what is all considered and what the IEC standard says about both.
Plane crash?
Earthquake?
Ebola outbreak?
Shark attack?
There are probably lots more things to add to that list. What could we do to prevent them? Not too much for some… a little more for others. But would those mitigations be practical? What tolerable risk can we accept for these…
This year, make your New Year’s resolution safety!
Take a moment this year and think about where you currently stand with functional safety. And actually, be honest with yourself. REALLY honest. Do you proof test on time, or does it sometimes get pushed out? Do you pull your devices…
SILSafeData contains upper and lower bound ranges of dangerous undetected failure rates for many automation devices. It was created by exida using statistical analysis of FMEDA failure rate predictions. The component database used in the FMEDAx tool is based on…
This is a question I often get asked when I’m teaching our FSE100 course on Functional Safety, when we discuss the purpose of Proof Testing and coverage. It’s amazing how many end users assume perfect proof testing (i.e. 100% coverage), that is capable of finding, all the…
I was recently approached with a question regarding why it would be necessary to certify mechanical devices, such as valves, per IEC 61508 when it is not clearly stated in the standard that the standard is applicable to such devices. After looking through IEC 61511 and
Do you have World Cup Fever? Well I do. Especially after the Netherlands (Holland) beat Spain 5-1 on Friday. I wished that was the score last time they played. So what does this have to do with failure rates? Sometimes my mind works in odd ways. While driving home…