Staying Safe Requires Layers of Protection

Think safety is expensive? Wait until you get a look at the bill for being unsafe.

The cost of process-related incidents in the U.S. is approximately $20 billion per year, but Honeywell Process Solutions (HPS) can help. Erik de Groot, market manager for HPS’ safety management solutions, reported on his company’s layered approach to safety during his “Integrated Safety System Solutions” presentation on the first day of Honeywell Users Group (HUG) 2008 on June 16 at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix.

“The first thing we advise users to do is to check the safety record of their facility, determine how many incidents they have per year, evaluate their present safety program, learn what layers of protection they now have in place and find out which needed layers are missing,” said de Groot. The main reasons for doing this include:

• Profit by maintaining highest availability and maximizing throughput and utilization;
• Reduced costs by positive impact on headcount, lower installed costs and reduced operational cost;
• Safe production by maintaining lowest risk levels;
• Company image maintenance via preventing incidents;
• Environmental protection by keeping product within containment facilities.

“Honeywell’s layered approach to process safety includes a completely integrated solution from basic control via advanced applications to safety, fire-and-gas and security solutions.” Honeywell’s Erik de Groot discussed the company’s unrivaled ability to bring together multiple aspects of safety and security for its end users.

To help users achieve and maintain desired safety levels and gain the resulting benefits, de Groot reported that Honeywell’s layered approach—from the outside down to the core—includes physical security, emergency response, safety-instrumented systems (SIS), boundary management, effective operating environment, abnormal situation management, asset management and detection, and finally, secure process control. Specifically, HPS’ integrated safety solutions fit neatly within its overall mission of safety, reliability and efficiency. For instance, safety is directed by preventing and mitigating emergency situations; reliability is accomplished by robustness that maximizes process availability; and efficiency is enabled by remote management and data exchange. In addition, HPS recently integrated its safety and fire-and-gas capabilities.

“We’re also making it easier to exchange data between our process and safety systems,” explained de Groot.

To implement a safety program and achieve safer operation, de Groot reported that users and their applications must have competent people, reduce risks, install SISs, guarantee safety over their facility’s lifetime, maintain operational efficiency and address cost-of-ownership issues. To improve staff competence, HPS has captured its more than 20 years of proven methods and solutions and now offers its Global Project Execution Process and Tools, which are TÜV-certified and IEC 61511-compliant. These enable project execution by allowing users to access the multiple TÜV-certified engineering locations that HPS operates worldwide.

“These tools give users clear and consistent safety system designs that are easy to understand and maintain, as well as the availability of Honeywell’s global expertise and knowledge,” said de Groot. “We also have multiple Honeywell engineering centers for large projects that may require many resources, but still need to be TÜV-certified. This helps smooth installation, commissioning and start-up due to standard proven-in-use applications and solutions.”

To further reduce risk, de Groot added that HPS has several new and improved solutions. These include:

• FSC R702.1 that supports Safety Manager I/O to cut costs and simplify migration to Safety Manager and is easier to use due to its Function Block Library Management tools, advanced forcing features that simplify optimization of safety applications and an Extended Help functionality.
• Safety Manager R131 that has Safety Manager—C300 P2P (PCDI), Modbus TCP, SafeNet P2P, remote management, redundant AO, exchange output module, fault configuration per point, QPP-0002 and builder enhancements for large applications.
• Remote Management with different security levels defined via configuration, including conservative, normal and progressive. Its unique IEC 62061- and IEC13849-approved confirmation mechanism allows management from any remote location and is password-protected.
• QPP-0002 module that boasts 40% faster processing, 40% larger applications, increased memory capacity to store images of all embedded software, hot back-up of application, configuration and system software and even a self-learning principle.

“It’s important to have a safety life-cycle program in place, and Honeywell can make doing it easier—and easier to maintain,” said de Groot. For example, to design and configure HPS’ Experion Safety Manager to be SIL3-compliant, users don’t have to do anything. Unlike other alternatives, we have no dedicated ‘safety code,’ no ‘safety configuration,’ no external relays, no external monitoring measures, no voting scheme tweaking and no cycle-time monitoring. In this case, SIL3 comes for free.”