Specialist safety instrumentation systems provider Hima-Sella has received an order for the design, manufacture and installation of an Emergency Shutdown System (ESD) for a major oil refinery in the UK. The system will monitor and record all safety critical functions – performed by the refinery’s Distributed Control System (DCS) – and support the fail-safe operation of the refinery; as well as allow for an orderly shutdown in the event of an emergency.
Hima-Sella is building the ESD around two HIMA HiMax Programmable Electronic Systems (PESs), which are powerful process safety platforms. To exhibit a Safety Integrity Level of 2 (SIL 2), as defined by the international functional safety standard IEC 61508, the ESD will interface with the refinery’s DCS via a secure digital data link and be networked to engineering, maintenance and configuration stations. In addition, the two HIMax systems will, between them and in their ESD role, dedicate some 150 analogue and 500 digital I/O channels to interfacing with a variety of temperature and pressure sensors and switches.
All signal conditioning will be performed on the I/O modules of each HIMax, thus reserving the platform’s processing power for performing calculations at speed, and both racks have spare I/O capacity should it be required at a later date (for example, site expansion).
Eddy Turnock, Hima-Sella’s Sales & Marketing Director, comments: “The HIMA HIMax is the ideal platform on which to base an Emergency Shutdown System for any process application. It is also a key component in supporting the plant owner’s or operator’s functional safety lifecycle management obligations. Once deployed, HIMax can accommodate virtually unlimited changes to hardware and software, including the operating system, without shutting down. It is therefore able to provide functional safety across a plant’s entire lifecycle, including modifications and expansions.”
The ESD is currently being built at Hima-Sella’s headquarters in Stockport, with installation and commissioning scheduled for early 2016.
