Article Archive
Latest 5 news articles
Meeting Safety Requirements: ‘Certified SIL Capable’
Life-saving safety equipment is becoming increasingly important in a wider cross-section of companies. So, at the same time, there is a growing trend to adopt best practices for the management of safety systems. Now industrial clients are looking for new design or upgrades to a plant to be in line with the Safety Instrumented System (SIS) standards of IEC61508* in addition to fire and gas system performance approvals. It is important that safety engineers and owners consider the fundamental e...
Improving Safety Through Behavior and Gas Exposure Tracking
The writing of this article follows on the heels of a meeting between the author and the Chief Deputy Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The purpose of that meeting was to investigate and discuss the circumstances of a fatal Pennsylvania mining accident. The Attorney General’s office was desperately trying to determine an answer to the question of why the portable gas monitor, that was carried by the victim and designed to detect the methane gas that was inadvertently ignit...
Dealing with the ATEX Directive - Negotiating the Maze of National and International Rules and Regulations can Baffle a Product Manager.
One of the new minefields for a product manager is the mandatory European Community (EC) Harmonised Safety Compliance Directives and Standards, with the most current being ATEX directive 94/9/EC. ATEX stands for “Atmosphere Explosives” (said in French) and it is the law in the EU since July of 2003.
WirelessHART™: The Industrial Wireless Standard
Wireless is unleashing the next wave of industry transformation due to its inherent flexibility, scaleability, and efficiency for improvement of distributed sensing and control systems. Proprietary wireless transmitters have existed in plants for many years but always focused on point-to-point cable-replacement applications. Now wireless networking is being realised in industrial process control since WirelessHART™, designed by the leading suppliers of instrumentation for the process control...
Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detection
Over the past several years there has been a quiet revolution in the art of gas detection with the steady introduction of a new technology to complement the existing methods of detecting gases. Conventional flammable gas detectors, either catalytic point, Infra red point or Infra red beam, all rely on two actions before they trip in to alarm, firstly, the gas leak cloud needs to actually reach and encompass the sensor or pass through the beam, secondly the gas concentration of the cloud has t...