Wave Radar Receives SIL3 Certificate from Exida

To what extend can a process be expected to perform safely? And in the event of a failure, to what extend can the process be expected to fail safely? These questions are answered through the assignment of a target Safety Integrity Level. SIL ratings measure the safety risk of a given process.

The higher the SIL level, the greater the impact of a failure and the lower the failure rate that is acceptable. Assigning a SIL level is thus based on the amount of risk reduction that is necessary and/or requested to maintain risk at an acceptable level.

To determine SIL in the process industry, one needs to consider the entire control loop. In order to be able to do so each device in this loop needs to have a safe failure fraction, one of the important device factors that needs to be calculated. It will be the total of all these different values that determines the obtained SIL level.

More than thirteen years ago, Magnetrol® (Belgium) was the first to introduce the two-wire guided wave radar to the marketplace. Now Eclipse®705 has received the exida certificate for a “SIL 3 Capable” device according to the IEC61508 : 2000 Parts 1-7. This means in practice that combining two devices in a 1oo2 set-up is in line with SIL 3 loop requirements. We like to put emphasis on” loop requirements” since it has to do with an entire installation, not only one device.

In addition to this SIL rating they also have several agency approvals, for example; ATEX, Lloyds, TÜV, and FM/CSA, for Magnetrol’s Eclipse®705.