Saving On Safety

One process manufacturer that is buying into the idea of integrated process control and safety systems is Solvay Chemicals Inc., a Houston-based provider of sodium products, peroxygens and fluorides.The company recently completed a year-long test of the ProSafe RS safety instrumented system (SIS) from Yokogawa Corp. of America, says Pascal Mansy, Solvay staff project engineer in Deer Park, Texas. The test showed that the system can likely produce significant cost savings—without compromising safety—when used in an integrated fashion with Solvay’s Yokogawa CS 3000 distributed control systems (DCSs), says Mansy.Solvay currently uses CS 3000 systems in two U.S. locations, where they are interfaced using Modbus to third-party SISs. But for future projects, “the company is ready to introduce ProSafe RS in our plants,” Mansy says.In the past, the need to map information between a third-party SIS and a DCS was both time consuming and problematic, Mansy says. “When you map it yourself, you never get all of the information,” he notes. “It’s sometimes difficult to know what provoked a shutdown.” But using an integrated CS 3000/ProSafe RS architecture will solve that problem, says Mansy, eliminating significant upfront engineering time while providing complete information exchange between the two systems.To see the main story this sidebar was taken from - "The Great Safety Debate" - please visit www.automationworld.com/view-3075