Safety World Tour vol.3
Safety Life-Cycle
Hello, everybody. My third essay is about lifecycles and functional safety.
In my two previous essays, I wrote about international standards for industrial safety. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) established and announced the IEC61508 standard on July 20, 1999 and the IEC61511standard on February 20, 2008.
We have the Japan Industrial Standards (JIS), which are based on the IEC standards. Many other countries have also chosen to adopt the IEC standards as their own. IEC61508 mainly deals with the basis for risk evaluation and safety designs, and is regarded as an industry bible.
My essay this time is more about IEC 61511, which mainly describes the safety lifecycle in the process industry.
The fundamental concept of the safety lifecycle is ensuring that safety measures function as planned in order to prevent the emergency from occurring.
I wrote about my grandparents’ house and the rusted handrails that failed to keep me from falling off from the terrace. The handrails failed to fulfill their function because they were old and had corroded. The safety lifecycle begins with defining the purpose of the safety measures.
This is followed by clarifying how they can perform their function.
In industrial plants, it is important to define the scope of the safety measures and the safety standards from the very early design stage. Large corporations with branch offices all over the world have their own corporate philosophy and standards for maintaining safe operations.
Do you remember the HAZOP study that I mentioned in my World Tour 1 article? It was about the risks and dangers around your own house. Suppose that you buy a house and have to make sure that it has all the needed functions and facilities.
For instance, households with aged people or a baby want a universal design that is barrier free and has flat floors; people who worry about natural disasters may want a house with an earthquake resistant design; environment-conscious people will like homes with an energy-saving design; and people living in urban areas may require a high-technology condominium. All houses are designed to hedge risks, suit a specific purpose, and fulfill certain functions.
Depending on what an industrial plant produces and its types of operations and equipment, the danger level will differ. From the design stage, consideration must be given to ways to eliminate risks in construction, operations, and other phases, and how to avoid the worst case scenario should an emergency occur. And above all, the safety loops that I wrote about in my previous story are extremely important.
The drawing here is taken from IEC61511, which describes the procedures for the overall safety lifecycle.
The safety loop is designed in stages #2 and 3. The safety loop with all the required specifications is configured in stage #4. Validation is done in stage #5, and then comes maintenance.
“First things first” is the fundamental plant safety theory. Safety must be built in when plant operations commence.
And the safety functions must be steadily maintained.
For the engineering work in these stages, it is mandatory to have an adequate knowledge of safety standards and countermeasures. It is not sufficient just to apply safety elements (e.g. sensors and logic solvers) that comply with the standards.
The IEC defines functional safety as the combination of elements used to construct safety loops that enhance safety, and IEC61511 sets out the engineering and maintenance standards for this purpose.
Not long after starting its safety business, Yokogawa obtained a Functional Safety Management certificate from TÜV （Rheinland), the safety authority. Group companies in the Netherlands, Malaysia, Singapore, and India have also been certified. Yokogawa has also adopted the IEC’s functional safety management standards as its own internal QA standards so that it can meet their highest specifications.
Our Group companies also maintain engineering organizations that match these high QA standards. Each functional safety management organization is required to pass an internal audit once a year and is managed very carefully. The internal audits are conducted by auditors who are authorized functional safety experts and who carry out their duties in accordance with IEC regulations. They report back to company managers so that improvements can be made constantly. There are many Yokogawa auditors around the world who are accredited safety experts.
I hope my essays about safety loops, the safety lifecycle, and functional safety have been helpful to you all. My next essay will be on the topics of safety and availability.
The Scent of Italy
Once a year, approximately 250 employees of our European Group companies get together for various seminars. This year (2008), the meeting was held at a hotel in Baveno, Italy.
As a lot of customers in Europe have already adopted safety instrumented systems that are based on the IEC standards, the participants were interested not only in logic solvers but also SIL2/SIL3 certified (or in the process of being certified) transmitters and analyzers.
The safety seminar looked at the themes of “pipe to pipe ” and “lifecycle,” with a focus on our SIL-certified standard transmitters and their associated proof tests, and on the partial stroking test for shutdown control valves.
Baveno is located about 50 km north of the Milan airport and is 100 km (about a 1.5 hour drive) from Milan. The city overlooks Lago Maggiore, the second largest lake in Italy. One side of the lake lies in Switzerland, and there are various islands with chateaus that were built by former members of the aristocratic class. The views from the town are quite beautiful. 
But enough about this. I had come to Italy and could not leave without eating pasta!
We enjoyed a BBQ at a lakeside restaurant and a buffet-style dinner at a hotel, and I fully enjoyed all the Italian flavors. The pasta in the picture on the right is yellow.
This was not as you might expect from the use of curry powder: I think it was based on saffron. Topped with deep fried onion seasoned with cream and herbs, this pasta dish went well with a medium dry white wine.
Away from the elegant hotel, we found a pizzeria every 20 meters on the street. I found more than 10 pizzerias in this town, which was so small that I think you could walk around it in less than one hour.
Each one of them was full and seemed to have an almost family-like atmosphere. I felt a bit out of place going into such an establishment, but why should I miss this opportunity to eat a pizza? I went in one of the pizzerias with a colleague.
I had a glass of locally brewed draft beer that was quite tasty. The pizza was of course home made, including the crust, and it did not come in the perfect round shape. But who cares? It was absolutely delicious.
The pizza cost about 900 yen and I thought it was quite reasonable. Italians drink wine with pizza, but the staff cleared the wine glasses from the table as soon as we ordered beer.
Perhaps it would have been cheaper to ask for a bottle of wine than for each of us to drink two glasses of beer. I could hardly make myself understood in English, but we somehow managed to get what we wanted.
Please try some beer, not just Italian wine, and be careful not to get drunk.
You need to make a safe journey from “pipe to pipe,” i.e. from the restaurant to the hotel.
