Thursday, September 07, 2006

Safety success leads to follow-on order

Safety control systems are now being delivered for Abu Dhabi's second largest gas gathering project, the Bab Gas Field
BP Amoco has placed a contract with ICS Triplex for a new Trusted(tm) Fire and Gas (F&G) system of over 1200 channels for the Magnus platform in the North Sea, and for associated installation and commissioning work. The Trusted(tm) system is certified by TÜV to the very demanding AK6 level to provide the highest standards of safety, but critically, the Triple Modular Redundant (TMR) triplicated architecturenote 1 also offers fault-tolerant operation to allow continuing safe operation of the platform even under system fault conditions. Under the fast track contract, ICS Triplex will deliver the hardware to site in early April 2000.

ICS Triplex will also supply, install and commission multiple fault-tolerant graphical man-machine interface (operator) stations that exchange information with the F&G system over dual redundant Ethernet using OPC (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control).

As well as various graphical views of the platform F&G system, operators will be able to view time stamped events and Sequence of Event logs accurate to within 1mS, made possible by the very fast scan time of the Trusted(tm) equipment.

Another major factor in the choice of ICS Triplex was the very compact Trusted(tm) hardware that will make it possible to install the new system alongside the old in the restricted space available, and so avoid a shut down during the changeover process.

Note: Fault-tolerance - ICS Triplex TMR architecture, with its three parallel channels and automated voting, is not just fail safe, it is inherently fault tolerant.

In the presence of a fault, Trusted(tm) TMR uses the fact that two healthy channels agree to identify and ignore a faulty channel which can then be replaced without a shut down to maintain safe operation essentially indefinitely.