When assets like equipment and systems are in use, there’s always the potential to cause harm to people, other equipment, and the environment. Understanding and managing these risks are critical for creating a safe environment.

Functional safety helps you reduce these risks by having a system in place to:

• Identify potential dangers
• Take action to avoid an accident or reduce its impact.

Through this course, you’ll gain an awareness of what functional safety is. You’ll learn about the standards and language involved, so you can feel confident delivering projects that have potential functional safety requirements and communicating with specialists. You’ll also know where and how functional safety specialists contribute to a project.

By the end of the course, you’ll be able to better manage functional safety requirements by knowing when you need to call in the specialists and effectively collaborate with them, knowing how to implement functional safety requirements in an engineering lifecycle, and successfully hand over a Safety Integrity Level (SIL) compliant system.

Topics we’ll cover

Introduction and context for functional safety

• Key terms and definitions
• Introduce umbrella standard IEC 61508 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/programmable electronic safety-related systems
• Links to Australian legislation.

Risk and safety integrity levels

• Hazard and risk analysis
• Tolerable risk
• Typical characteristics of safety integrity functions
• Probability of dangerous failure on demand.

The functional safety lifecycle

• Systematic failures of a safety instrumented function
• Analysis phase activities and documentation
• Realisation phase activities and documentation
• Operations and maintenance phase activities and documentation.

Management of Functional Safety

• Planning
• Verification
• Auditing and assessment.

Application of functional safety

• The engineering lifecycle and functional safety
• Functional safety for the process industry (IEC 61511)
• Machine safety (AS/NZS 4024 series and AS/NZS 62061)
• Rail Safety
• Burner management systems (AS 3814).

Guidelines for safety instrumented systems design

• Safety response time
• Continuous and demand mode functions
• Hardware fault tolerance
• Spurious trip
• Common cause failure
• Diagnostics
• Bypasses and overrides
• Simplicity.

Learning outcomes

• Recognise the situations and industries where functional safety is required, and know which relevant standards and codes apply
• Understand the fundamental concepts of functional safety, when it applies, and how it’s integrated with engineering, safety and design processes
• Be aware of how risk assessment determines the safety integrity level (SIL) required
• Know the different types of failure of Safety Instrumented Functions
• Collaborate more effectively with functional safety specialists
• Understand the potential implications for project scope, schedule and budget of functional safety engineering

This course will suit if you have a basic understanding of process safety, process control, instrumentation or automation, and are:

• A designer
• An engineer
• A project manager
• A design manager or technical lead
• A procurement or contracts person
• An engineering consultant
   

This course is beneficial across a range of disciplines (i.e. electrical, control systems, process, mechanical) and industries (i.e. power generation, mining, oil & gas, chemicals, major hazard facilities, manufacturing).