New handbook: Reliability Data for Safety Equipment

Are you working with reliability of safety related equipment? Do you want to predict how your safety functions will perform during operation? Are you working in an engineering company or as a consultant, and need to verify quantitative safety integrity level (SIL) requirements, or provide credible input values to layer of protection analyses (LOPA)? Or are you a maintenance engineer and want to compare the operational performance of your safety system with typical industry values?

If so, the PDS data handbook is the ideal companion. The reliability data herein are based on comprehensive operational experience, and the detailing and assessment of the data have been significantly improved as compared to previous versions. The data have been subject to extensive quality assurance, where equipment experts and operational personnel have gone through and classified some thirty thousand maintenance notifications and work orders manually.

The PDS handbook has become the preferred data source among Norwegian companies involved in the analyses of safety systems for the process industry, and has also been sold extensively abroad.

According to Mathilde Elisabeth Cot, Principal Consultant Safety Technical safety at Equinor:
«Equinor has contributed with a large amount of data to the 2021 Edition of the PDS data handbook, and had particular focus on quality assurance of dangerous undetected failures. We consider that the PDS data handbook provides reliability data that is realistic and representative of operating experience for safety systems installed at large scale on our installations and in our projects, so we use it as the recommended data source for reliability and safety integrity level (SIL) calculations.“

The handbook provides reliability data based on field feedback for safety equipment and includes detailed data dossiers for input devices (sensors, transmitters, detectors, etc.), control logic solvers (electronics) and final elements (valves, dampers, pumps, etc.), both for topside, subsea and some drilling related equipment. The handbook and associated data dossiers comprise recommended values for failure rates, safe failure fraction (SFF), diagnostic coverage (DC), proof test coverage (PTC), discussion of failures causes, as well as detailed information about the underlying data sources.

The 2021 PDS Data Handbook can be purchased here.

Visit PDS forum here, and learn more about the APOS project here.