Process Safety Blog
Process Safety Blog
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I'm taking a stance, and publicly telling you my vision on the issue of separation and integration for safety and control. When this happens, is still up to debate.
As I began my career in Process Control almost 20 years ago, I remember asking my mentor why our process & instrumentation diagrams (P&ID’s) showed field instruments and final control elements wired up to two different control systems. His simple explanation was that the distributed control system (DCS) was used to control the process while the programmable logic controller (PLC) was for safety interlocks. That made no sense to me considering my lack of experience, so I pushed him for a better explanation. His polite, yet ‘curt’ response on my follow up questioning went something like this “Look kid, the PLC does binary or discrete logic while the DCS does analog or 4-20ma logic”. Okay, electrically that made sense to me, not sure why, but I left it at that.
This past fall I was appointed as the Safety theme chair for ISA expo 2009 (Oct 6-8 2009). Essentially what this means is that I’m responsible for putting together the entire track of safety sessions.
At first I was honored and excited about the opportunity to put together a 3 day focus on safety. But now, with the economy as it is, and travel restrictions for many of us, I’m finding this to be a challenging task.
Charles Fialkowski answers SIX of the most commonly misunderstood Process Safety Topics at the New York City exiderdome, November 5th at 4:15pm.