New Safety Certification Service for the Process Industry

Phil Black - PII Editor 08/04/2014

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TÜV SÜD Product Service today launches a UK-based Safety Integrity Level (SIL) certification service for the process industry. This will enable manufacturers of safety-related controls to assure purchasers that their product functions according to the required performance levels set out in IEC 61511.

The initial phase of the new TÜV SÜD service includes a gap analysis process to ascertain if the safety component will achieve the required SIL or performance level, or if other measures must be taken before certification. This will minimise the certification process phase, saving safety-related control manufacturers costs and reducing time to market for newly designed products.

Paul Laidler, Business Director for Machinery Safety at TÜV SÜD Product Service, said: “If a safety related control function does not have the required integrity, it may fail unexpectedly and the machine will lose function, or worse, injure an operator. Any claim of functional safety for a component, subsystem or system should therefore be independently certified to one of the recognised functional safety standards. Our new certification service will help manufacturers to assure customers in the process industry that their safety control system will reduce the risk to the required level once installed.”

A SIL is determined primarily from the assessment of three factors, with the highest levels requiring greater compliance with each: 1) improved reliability 2) failure to safety 3) management, systematic techniques, verification and validation.

International standard IEC 61508 (Functional Safety of Electrical/Electronic/Programmable Electronic Safety-related Systems) is the basic functional safety standard applicable to all industries. IEC 61511 (Functional safety – Safety instrumented systems for the process industry sector) is derived from this generic standard and sets out practices in the engineering of systems that ensure the safety of an industrial process through the use of instrumentation.