Safety system gets go-ahead from Saudi Aramco

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Dec 12, 2001

Trusted, the triple modular redundancy (TMR) electronic safety system, has been approved for installation and use on Saudi Aramco facilities, following an extensive two-year assessment

Trusted, the triple modular redundancy (TMR) electronic safety system manufactured by ICS Triplex, has been approved for installation and use on Saudi Aramco facilities, following an extensive two-year assessment programme.

The evaluation process included assessment of the Trusted hardware and software, inspections of ICS Triplex's manufacturing plants and integration facilities, monitoring of record keeping procedures and validation of corporate viability.

The Trusted joins the prestigious Aramco RVL (Restricted Vendor Listing) alongside only one other TMR system.

ICS Triplex expects that membership of the RVL will lead to the installation of about 25 systems a year, as Trusted will now be part of all worldwide Aramco requests for quotes for safety and control systems.

The value of this business should be around US$5m.

The market for safety systems is global and highly regulated.

Its current value, according to specialist market analysts at ARC (Automation Research Corporation) is around $425m a year, 40 per cent of which is in the European, Middle East and West Africa region.

The market is expanding at 5-10 per cent annually, due to continued exploration and also to retrofit and upgrade projects in existing facilities as safety issues become subject to ever-tighter legislation.

TMR systems like the Trusted are used in exploration, extraction, processing and distribution systems throughout the petrochemical sector, where safety is paramount but spurious shutdowns must be avoided due to the massive disruption to production they cause.

In order to prevent unnecessary shutdowns associated with failsafe systems, the Trusted is built from a fault tolerant triple modular redundant RunSafe design.

This provides the user with 1msec sequence of event resolution, which ensures exceptional performance by multiple-level assessment of possible fault signals Trusted technology continues to be the technology leader with recent release of version 3.0, a package of new features which further widen its flexibility.