(52an) Best Practices to Maintain Integrity of Safety Critical Equipment during Operations

Safety Critical Equipment (SCE) plays a significant role in prevention or mitigation of major accidents. Maintaining the integrity of the SCEs is a critical activity to ensure their availability when needed during hazardous situations. The SCE integrity could be maintained during operations with established guidelines and strategies for identification, inspection, testing, and maintenance.

This paper discusses challenges faced during operation and practical implementation of strategies to maintain SCE integrity. Typically, the SCEs are identified at the system level after completion of hazard identification and bowtie studies i.e., Safety Instrumented Function, ESD System, Fire and Gas Detection System. It has been found through operational experience that SCEs identified at the component or tag level is beneficial. The asset register that consists of parent assets and its associated child assets of a project or a facility can be used for identifying the SCEs.

Once the SCEs are established appropriately, Performance Standards (PS) shall be developed to prescribe inspection, testing, and maintenance (ITM) requirements. These PS should be based on safety studies, industry standards, equipment vendor recommendations, Subject Matter Experts (SME) inputs, etc. Development of the PS is a rigorous process led by process safety involving other key disciplines such as engineering, asset integrity, maintenance, and operations.

The SCEs and their ITM requirements will have to be included in the company maintenance management system (such as SAP) to assist the maintenance team to prioritize the SCEs. Periodic monitoring of the ITM activities is required to assure schedules are complied with. Deferment of the ITM activities for SCE should be complied with Maintenance Deferment Process (MDP) or Integrity Down Grade Process (IDGP). In addition, any changes to the SCE should follow the Company Management of Change (MOC) process.