The Intrinsic Safety Alternative

Intrinsic Safety (IS) makes it possible to perform live maintenance at any point in the control loop because, by its nature, IS always keeps the amount of available energy on the wire pair below the ignition point for the gases/environment in which it's installed. There are two aspects to determining the hazardous area requirements for an installation: area classification (the type of gas present and the likelihood of it being present) and the temperature classification (maximum surface temperature of the device or apparatus).

Figure 1 shows how area classifications are determined for North America using the class-and-division principle. The division is based on the likelihood of a specific type of gas being present at any point in time. As a rule of thumb, Division 2 assumes the potentially explosive gas is present one hour/year, and Division 0 assumes the gas is always present.

The second aspect of hazardous area control is the temperature rating. Figure 2 shows how the type of gas present determines the required "T-rating."

Fortunately, the majority of the hydrocarbon industry needs to meet only the T1 or T2 temperature limitations for the majority of its facilities, and this is often why the T-rating is overlooked when specifying and purchasing instruments. When we think about temperatures, we tend to be more concerned with the ambient temperature range in which the device can continue to operate.

Intrinsic safety is entity-based, meaning all the components need to be considered as a single entity. The devices in the loop also need to be treated as "simple apparatus" as defined in ISA–60079-11 (12.02.01)–2009 "Explosive Atmospheres — Part 11: Equipment Protection by Intrinsic Safety," which is summarized below:

Simple apparatus are defined as those devices in the following three categories:

1. Passive components, including items such as switches, junction boxes, resistors and simple semiconductor devices that neither store nor generate energy. Sensors that use catalytic reaction or other electrochemical mechanisms are not normally simple apparatus.

2. Stored energy sources consisting of single components in simple circuits with well-defined parameters; for example, capacitors or inductors, whose energy storing values should be considered when determining the overall safety of the system.

3. Generated energy sources; that is, thermocouples and photocells that do not generate more than 1.5 V, 100 mA and 25 mW.

Comparison of Barrier and Isolator Schematics
Barriers	Isolators
Simple and reliable	More complex, statistically lower MTBF than barrier
Extremely accurate in many applications	Active devices: power and heat Flexibility in bonding practice
High-integrity bond required Predictable response to earth faults	Flexible response to earth faults
Inexpensive	Generally more expensive
Applications are defined in terms of voltage and resistance	Application-specific. Each barrier is defined in terms of the function that it is designed to perform.
Encapsulated design necessary Tight power supply limits (except ‘protected’/fused barriers	Replaceable supply fuse common
Easier to fault find (earth reference)	Wide power supply tolerance

In addition to the above, the following (taken from the ISA standard) also applies to simple apparatus installations:

• Simple apparatus shall not achieve safety by the inclusion of voltage and/or current-limiting and/or suppression devices.

• Simple apparatus shall not contain any means of increasing the available voltage or current, for example dc-dc converters.

• Simple apparatus located in the explosive gas atmosphere shall be temperature-classified.

• Where simple apparatus forms part of an apparatus containing other electrical circuits, the whole shall be assessed according to the requirements of ISA–60079-11 (12.02.01)–2009.

Because with entity systems you need to understand interaction between each component on a loop, I/O card, barrier or field device, the entity concept works well for loops with one I/O card and one field device. However, if you have multiple devices on a wire pair, as with fieldbus systems, the number of combinations that need to be verified quickly grows exponentially. This is one of the reasons most process fieldbus systems use FISCO as described in the June 2010 issue of Control.

Furthermore, intrinsically safe circuits need to be kept separate from non-intrinsically safe circuits with the following minimum requirements:

• All terminals for intrinsically safe circuits shall be separated from terminals for non-intrinsically safe circuits where intrinsic safety can be impaired by external wiring that, if disconnected from the terminal, can come into contact with conductors or components by distance or terminal location.

• When separation is accomplished by distance, the clearance between bare conducting parts of terminals shall be at least 50 mm, including ensuring that contact between circuits is unlikely if a wire becomes dislodged.