Modern chemical and hydrocarbon processing plants, oil & gas production facilities, power plants and other similar process plants all have some instrumented systems that ensure functional safety. These are known as Safety Instrumented Systems (SIS for short). This post is about SIS and how you can avoid certain pitfalls while designing them. To those of … Read more
As if we did not have enough of welding related fire accidents in conventional plants (read my last post on the issue here ), now we have a report of a similar accident in a Japanese nuclear plant. Here is the incident reported by various agencies: A fire broke out at a nuclear power plant … Read more
It is now almost three years since the Buncefield oil storage depot explosion took place and finally the authorities have declared, that they will be pressing criminal charges against five companies, ostensibly who have been found guilty of acts of omission. For those of you who do not remember the case, here is a short … Read more
Running an industrial manufacturing plant in these days is tough. First, you have to meet all the production and cost targets, whereas you are not allowed to hire more hands (due to the slowing economy), or to have any safety violations or incidents, nor any environmental issues. With shrinking budgets and an equally shrinking manpower, … Read more
Lately, there have been many launches of new “integrated” control systems, that have both DCS and SIS systems in the same package. For those of you are not familiar with these terms, an SIS is short for “Safety Instrumented System“, which is a special kind of control system that is used for the safety critical … Read more
