Functional Safety Fundamentals
Functional Safety Is More Than a PFDavg Calculation
Ask most people what functional safety involves and you'll hear about PFDavg. The calculation is one of three design gates, and the program around it has to run for the…
Beta Factor Estimation – Checking the Certificate Value Against Your Installation
The beta factor in a vendor's safety manual describes one device under conditions the vendor assumed. Beta factor estimation with IEC 61508-6 Annex D checks that number against your installation,…
Functional Safety Fundamentals
The History of Functional Safety
Functional safety did not arrive in a tidy sequence of accidents, regulations, and standards. The committees, the regulators, the hardware, and the disasters were all moving at once. A narrative…
The Basra Ammonia Leak: What We Know So Far
On September 13, 2026, a pump failure at the Southern Fertilizer Company in Basra, Iraq, released ammonia, killing two workers and injuring 114 people. Injured workers stopped the release by…
Functional Safety Fundamentals, SIL Math and Reliability
2oo3 Architecture: The Design Decision Behind Majority Voting
2oo3 voting gives a SIF a hardware fault tolerance of 1 without doubling the spurious trip rate. See how 2oo3 compares with 1oo1, 1oo2, and 2oo2 on the same numbers,…
The Amur Gas Chemical Complex Fire: What We Know So Far
An explosion and fire at the Amur Gas Chemical Complex in Russia's Far East killed 15 workers during commissioning, weeks before the plant was due to make its first product.…
The Same Explosion, Eleven Years Apart
In August 2026, two explosions killed two workers at a Brent Industries plant in Toledo. Eleven years earlier, a nearly identical blast killed an operator at the company's Alabama plant,…
Where Does the Data Come From? A Guide to Failure Rate Data Sources in Functional Safety
For most SIL verification the certificate and safety manual already answer the data question. This guide covers what to do when they do not: plant records, OREDA, the PDS handbook,…
Process Hazard Analysis (PHA): One Term, Many Meanings
Process hazard analysis is one of the most searched terms in process safety, and one of the loosest. What a PHA actually is, how it differs from the IEC 61511-1…
