Spurious activation analysis of safety-instrumented systems

Abraham Almaw Jigar, Yiliu Liu and Mary Ann Lundteigen

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2016, vol. 156, issue C, 15-23

Abstract: Safety-instrumented systems are used in industries to prevent the development of a process upset into an accident. For most processes, the desired response in the case of a process upset is to shutdown the process, and most safety-instrumented systems are designed so that this state is achieved in response to also specific item failures or loss of power. The side-effect of such fail-safe design may be that the safety-instrumented system is prone to spurious activation, meaning that the normal operation of the process may be interrupted in an untimely manner. In the design of a safety-instrumented system, it is therefore important to quantify the rate of spurious activation and to check the need for additional measures to ensure a stable as well as safe operation of the process. Unfortunately, weaknesses have been identified in formulas for spurious trip rate, and the aim of this paper is to present a further development of currently available analytical formulas. The paper builds the new formulas on a thorough discussion of the concepts of spurious activation, failure classification, and failure propagation in a safety-instrumented system. The proposed formulas are compared with existing ones for selected architectures, and some conclusions are drawn.

Keywords: Spurious activation; Spurious operation; Spurious trip rate (STR); Safety-instrumented system (SIS); Systematic failure; Common cause failure (CCF) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:156:y:2016:i:c:p:15-23

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2016.06.015

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