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July 2009

Cover Story

Smart instruments in safety instrumented systems

The U.K.'s largest nuclear site operator implements IEC61508 and finds the quality of instrument firmware to be variable, but improving
FAST FORWARD
When instrument manufacturers provide functional safety compliance certificates, always read the small print. Instrument manufacturers ability to produce instrument firmware to IEC61508 standards is variable, immature, or difficult to assess. However, it is improving. KISS (keep it simple stupid) is still excellent advice for design.

By Tom Nobes

Instruments containing firmware (smarts) have advantages over traditional analogue instruments in terms of self-diagnosis, ease of calibration, improved accuracy, and cost. However, the safety justification of smarts can present difficulties. International standards and the British Nuclear Installation Inspectorates (NIIs) licensing process expect, even when there are only modest safety claims to be justified, we (Sellafield) assemble detailed information about the smarts development process and the final product. This expectation works on the premise that without full visibility of the internal structure of the smart, Sellafield cannot demonstrate it is safe for the proposed safety function. We define a smart instrument as one that measures or directly controls a single process variable, uses a microprocessor and is a commercial off the shelf instrument. It includes flexibility in its use due to parameters set by the user. Its life cycle includes generic fixed firmware by the manufacturer and particular configuration by the user. Smarts are not restricted to measurements but include actuators, valves, motor variable speed drives, and other control equipment. So smarts include pressure, temperature, flow, level, density, pH, and conductivity transmitters, three-term (PID) controllers, recorders, motor starters, speed controllers, soft starters, and control valve actuators (and probably a lot more things too). Smart instruments can also communicate by using the Highway Address Remote Transmitter (HART) language, a simple, cheap, and robust protocol that has proven reliable. What are excluded from the definition are PLC, SCADA and DCS systems. Also excluded are unique programmable systems. In essence, anything that contains full variability language. Firmware is defined as fixed programming language where the user has no ability to change the program itself

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