August 6, 2015 – ISA published a guide to designing and implementing performance-based Fire and Gas Systems (FGS) for process industries, as described in the ISA technical report, ISA-TR84.00.07-2010, Guidance on the Evaluation of Fire and Gas System Effectiveness.
“This book, The Performance-based Fire and Gas Systems Engineering Handbook, is an essential follow-up to the ISA-TR84.00.07 technical report because it provides the practical, how-to direction on designing and implementing a performance-based FGS that’s not covered in the technical report,” says Austin M. Bryan, a senior engineer at Kenexis Consulting Corporation who co-authored the publication along with two of his Kenexis Consulting colleagues, Elizabeth Smith and Kevin J. Mitchell.
The ISA-TR84.00.07 technical report, Bryan explains, is a breakthrough in risk-based fire and gas systems engineering for industrial process settings: “The report takes the basic concepts used in performance-based Safety Instrumented Systems design and shows how they can be applied to the design of an FGS. Performance-based FGS design relies on risk assessment to ensure a specified level of system performance.
This more flexible, tailored approach meets the needs of process industries, which have many highly specific concerns, such as combustible or toxic gas, and seek to move away from ‘one-size-fits-all,’ prescriptive systems.”
While the ISA-TR84.00.07 technical report describes how the concepts of performance based design can be applied to FGS design and the special considerations that must be made to do so, it does not provide any explanation on how to actually develop such a design.
“That’s where our book comes in,” Bryan maintains. “It presents the FGS lifecycle and associated workflow needed for FGS designers of industrial systems to fully understand the performance-based design concepts underlying the technical report, and delivers the practical guidance on how these concepts may be implemented.”
About ISA
The International Society of Automation is a nonprofit professional association that sets the standard for those who apply engineering and technology to improve the management, safety, and cybersecurity of modern automation and control systems used across industry and critical infrastructure. Founded in 1945, ISA develops widely used global standards; certifies industry professionals; provides education and training; publishes books and technical articles; hosts conferences and exhibits; and provides networking and career development programs for its 36,000 members and 350,000 customers around the world.
