This company’s valve portfolio was recently assessed and certified in accordance with IEC 61508 and the new EN 17955 standard. According to independent functional safety specialist exida, this is the first EN 17955 certification of a manufacturer of lined valves that exida has evaluated to date, making this valve portfolio among the first to provide substantiated evidence for the use of automated industrial valves in Safety Integrity Level (SIL) applications. Published in November 2024, EN 17955 closes a key gap in functional safety. While IEC 61508 provides the foundation for SIL, it contains only limited specific requirements for mechanical components such as valves and actuators. Until now, this has resulted in different assessment methods, varying failure rates and limited comparability of manufacturers’ data.
Source: Richter Chemie
For the first time, EN 17955 establishes a consistent assessment framework for safety-related automated industrial valves. The standard defines how mechanical components are to be evaluated in terms of design, qualification, testing, operation, maintenance and documentation. This makes SIL data more traceable, improves product comparability and significantly facilitates the selection of suitable valves for safety-related systems. This clarity is particularly valuable to operators in the pharmaceutical, chemical, petrochemical and specialty chemical industries. In these sectors, stringent requirements for process safety, documentation and traceability coincide with aggressive, toxic or particularly sensitive media. — Richter Chemie-Technik GmbH, a unit of IDEX Corp., Kempen, Germany