Friday, January 16, 2009

ABB's SIS One of the most interesting "religious" battles in process control involves whether or to what degree control and safety systems should be integrated. Each company has a somewhat different take on the subject--sometimes based on history, and sometime unique engineering opportunities. ABB takes the integrated approach, and it has just upgraded its 800xA Safety Integrated System. Here's the details. ABB recently released its next generation System 800xA High Integrity safety system. According to the release, this SIL 3 rated Safety Integrated System (SIS) provides the highest level of integration of safety and control on the market today; its controller received its SIL 3 certification from TUV in November 2008. "This next generation safety system offering is a continuation of our ongoing commitment to help our customers operate more safely and efficiently, to protect their vital assets while they improve their productivity and maximize uptime," said Kristian Olsson, manager of ABBâo[dot accent]s Safety Center of Excellence. "The latest version of System 800xA High Integrity provides the highest level of safety and process integration available in the marketplace; it harnesses the benefits of the 800xA environment to ensure significant savings across all stages of the system lifecycle. It complements ABB's robust portfolio of leading edge safety solutions, products and services." The company has been at the forefront of safety system development and delivery since 1979, when it commissioned the first emergency shut down system on the Statfjord B offshore oil platform in the North Sea. ABB is commemorating its 30 years of extensive safety experience in 2009. System 800xA High Integrity leverages System 800xA's common engineering tools, human system interface, historian, audit trail, asset and device management applications. The system is available up to and including Quad configuration to allow end users to tailor their safety system solutions to specific process requirements to optimize efficiency and cost. First released in 2005, System 800xA High Integrity offers the flexibility of hosting both safety and process critical control applications in the same controller, providing logical separation of control and safety functions. This "same yet separate" architecture protects personnel, the plant and the environment while proving significant operating efficiencies. ABB worked closely with customer Dow Chemical to develop this system and make it available commercially, as Dow had experienced tremendous benefits from this approach in their own proprietary system. The latest version of the System 800xA High Integrity SIS includes several new features including embedded hardware and software diversity in the logic solver and I/O subsystem, with diverse execution paths to detect any potential random failures. It includes additional SIL 3 libraries for shut-down applications, and provides combined non-SIL, SIL 2 and SIL 3 applications for increased safety protection and process efficiency. While embedded safety and control is one option offered by System 800xA High Integrity, the customer can also deploy it in several other possible configurations. The system was designed at the outset to be able to operate as a stand-alone safety system, or can also be integrated with the process control system while it maintains physical separation of control and safety functions. 4:51:51 PM    comment []

Travels I've been really swamped with correspondence and interviews the past several days. We're trying to get our February issue done while I'm interviewing for my March feature article on Green Engineering (aka Sustainable Engineering). I still have some time, so if any of you have green stories, send me a note. The annual ARC Forum in Orlando is coming up in just a couple of weeks. I arrive Monday morning 2/2 and will promptly go into a 6-hour press conference marathon. Several of the press conferences will actually include announcing new products. Those I will report on. Look for blog postings during the day there. I intend to go to the opening sessions of the forum, then I have many interviews with various industry leaders. Should be very interesting. Hope to slip away and see my son and grandson for a little while, too. If you see me, stop and say hi. Hope to see a lot of Feed Forward readers in the sunny south. Hmm, this is my 1900th post. I started this gig in December 2003. The last metrics I saw (which I don't trust, but they sound good) said that there are 100,000 readers of this blog. Thank you all for stopping by. I also appreciate all of you who have taken a little time to comment or send messages--even hate ones. Keep up the conversation. 4:46:52 PM    comment []