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This is a question I have often been asked in the past.  Most people I have spoken with don’t have a good appreciation of what this means and the purpose.  From the IEC61511 perspective, designers of Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS) are required to justify the selection…

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This is an important question.  Mining today is a lot more modernized and automated than in the past, yet there are still accidents occurring.  The Impala hoist accident in South Africa in November of 2023 is an example, where there was a tragic loss of life when the hoist…

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Has your FMEA entered the realm of the paperwork exercise that we force ourselves to do for no real reason than someone says we must do it?

I have enjoyed analysis using FMEA. I first learned it existed when I was working for Ford. FMEA was the first Ford…

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I have been asked this question many times by various clients over the years.  This comes down to whether a perfect proof test is assumed or not.  Let us remember that Mission Time is defined as the amount of time we expect a set of SIF equipment to run until a…

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I find YouTube to be a good source of information on many subjects. Want to know how to fix a widget? There are probably a few videos on that exact subject.  Technical subjects are also there.  I was searching on “FMEA” and found an interesting looking video on the “Read More...

What is Memory Mapping?

Memory mapping is a technique used in computer systems to manage memory resources safely, it involves creating a virtual address space that corresponds directly to the physical memory or to a portion of it, this allows programs to access memory in a way that is…

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The C programming language has undoubtably extremely successful. It consistently ranks highly in the various rankings of most popular programming languages however these studies seem to be measured. C is not a language that is naturally suited to having safety requirements given to it. So, unsuited is it to…

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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…

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From a machine safety management perspective, what goals are you looking to establish? Building a company safety culture, building awareness of the hazards, building the "buy in" to do things right and do things consistently is very important. It can't be done by a single person.  It takes the…

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What is driving machine safety adoption? What are some of the key questions that companies are trying to answer when it comes to machine safety? For industrial facilities, whether it's a chemical plant, or a machine application, it ultimately comes down to facility risk management. Companies want to provide…

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Why would someone consider purchasing templates as a starting point? First off, it decreases the amount of time and energy it takes to build out the program. If you think about starting from a blank page, as opposed to starting with something that is 80 to 90% of the…

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Common Cause is one of those variables that is not always considered important when it comes to SIL compliance.  And yet, for redundant systems, it can have a significant impact on the PFDavg and Risk Reduction achieved (in Low Demand mode) or PFH (in high or continuous mode).  Most of the…

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Functional Safety Management (FSM) is important for a few key reasons. First, it governs the entire machine safety lifecycle. Regardless of which standards we pick, we need to have the management plan in place to make sure we follow those steps and that we do them consistently. 

Allocating lifecycle…

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During 2017, there were over 36,000 injuries related to machinery in the United States. There were 6200 non-fatal amputations, nearly 60% involving machinery. There were close to 3000 fatalities in 2019. Machine accidents are often overlooked because there aren't multiple fatality explosions or major news events like you see…

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We want our system to work. We're going to do everything we can to make it work properly. If it doesn't work, we want it to fail in a predictable and hopefully safe manner. If the failure modes are predictable, we can design the equipment to be fail safe.…

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