In today’s operational climate, it’s vital to get the most out of your existing equipment. Avoiding needless downtime is more essential than ever. Using Control Systems HAZOP (CHAZOP), the risks and impact of control systems failures can readily be assessed, yielding an action plan for preventing losses and accidents caused by control system upsets.
CHAZOP also gives important input to a RAMS (Reliability – Availability – Maintainability Study), giving you a pathway towards optimal use of maintenance resources and helping you increase uptime and throughput.
The team at xSeriCon is exceptionally experienced in leading CHAZOP studies in the process and energy sectors. Contact us to find out about our cost-effective CHAZOP and RAMS solutions.
To understand the weaknesses of a control system and its potential for failure, a number of steps may be required. Each of these steps can be termed CHAZOP, although the term CHAZOP is most commonly applied to the second step:
A CHAZOP workshop study is a deep dive into the detailed workings of the control equipment, looking for any potential points of failure, especially single-point failure. Aspects to be considered include power supplies, hardware failure, software bugs, human factors, maintainability, non-normal operating conditions, and diagnostics, among others. In each case, the team asks the questions:
The CHAZOP report shows all the cases considered, and lists prioritized actions for improvement or further study.
In a recent CHAZOP study performed by the xSeriCon team, a client desired to perform a study to find vulnerabilities in the control system of a gas metering plant. The study was commissioned following a trip incident caused by a hardware maintainability problem, which led to shutdown of a gas-fired power station nearby.
The study found a number of unexpected issues for further investigation, including: