Functional Safety and Taxes: Are you an expert?

Today, April 15th, is tax-day in the US.  Ok, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has given us a few extra days this year (the tax filing deadline is not until April 18th).

There are a lot of similarities between how you do your taxes and how you handle your functional safety.  As for filing taxes, some choose to:

• Hire an accountant (3rd party)
• Buy a software program to guide them through the process
• Manually complete the required tax forms

When it comes to functional safety, I see the same approach. There are end-users (owners/operators) that:

• Hire a 3rd party to assist
• Buy a software program
• Use an…

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Functional Safety Certification • (0) Comments • Permalink

2011…A Year in Review

2011 was a good year in many ways for Functional Safety and Cyber Security. Several instrumentation products achieved IEC 61508 certification. exida Certification alone issued 64 product certifications (http://www.sael-onine.com).  With most certification projects, improvements to the design and quality are made.  Some manufacturers are now quite focused on significant improvements to future products that should improve safety and reliability.  Innovation in automatic self-diagnostics also occurred in 2011.  The statistical analysis packages introduced last year in pressure transmitters are currently used to detect plugged impulse lines.  The technique is finding new diagnostic applications finding other failures.  I have seen more compliance voltage monitoring in transmitters, new methods for detecting sensor failures in transmitters, better partial valve stroke monitoring, and…

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