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/ Back to Basics 02 - Safety Integrity Level (SIL)

Back to Basics 02 - Safety Integrity Level

(SIL)

Loren Stewart, CFSE

Thursday, March 28, 2019

In the following series of blogs, we'll go back to basics and run down everything you need to know to get started in
functional safety. We'll start with some more general terms and descriptions and make our way to more advanced
material.

2. Safety Integrity Level (SIL)

SIL – Safety Integrity Level – is a quantitative target for measuring the level of performance
needed for a safety function to achieve a tolerable risk for a process hazard. It is defined in
both . Defining a target SIL level for the process should be based on the assessment of the
likelihood that an incident will occur and the consequences of the incident.

It is a discrete level (one out of four) for specifying the safety integrity requirements of the
safety instrumented functions to be allocated to the safety instrumented systems. SIL 4 has the
highest safety integrity and SIL 1 the lowest.

IEC 61511 only defines requirements for SIL 1 to SIL 3, as it is expected that SIL 3 will be a
maximum level in the process sector (excepting Nuclear). For SIL 4, IEC 61511 refers the user
back to the detail in IEC 61508.
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IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 both have tables with the Safety Integrity Levels associated with
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Probability of Failure, Risk Reduction Factor, Hardware Fault Tolerance and Architecture.
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Other Blog Posts By Loren Stewart

Back to Basics 22 – Cycle Testing (https://www.exida.com/Blog/back-to-basics-22-cycle-testing)
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Back to Basics 20 – Safe Failure Fraction, SFF (https://www.exida.com/Blog/back-to-the-basics-20-safe-
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Back to Basics 19 – Route 2H (https://www.exida.com/Blog/back-to-the-basics-19-route-2h)
Back to Basics 18 – Route 1H (https://www.exida.com/Blog/back-to-the-basics-18-route-1h)

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