In anticipation of  the adoption of ‘safe combustion systems’ as an IFRF Objective by the Joint Committee, the first safety orientated TOTeM (T43) was held in Sheffield in June (see another article in this issue of Monday Night Mail). Today we pursue this new initiative with information regarding the drafting of revised safety standards for furnaces covered by the CEN/ISO standards for oil and gas industry equipment.

[1] The secretary of CEN TC 244 has announced that they have started a second round to harmonize ISO 13577 to EN 746 standard. For this process to be completed technical experts have to be nominated by 5 P-member countries through their respective national standardisation body. At this moment experts from 4 countries (Germany, Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands) have been nominated. Please contact your national standardisation body if you would be interested to participate in the commenting procedure and/or become nominated as expert for you country. EN 746 1997/2010 “Industrial thermoprocessing equipment” specifies common safety requirements for industrial thermoprocessing equipment (for example industrial furnaces and industrial heating equipment). The EN 746 standard has been used as basis to develop the international standard ISO 13577. The ISO standard contains geographical annexes for Europe which have to be included in the body text of the new issue of EN 746

 [2] On request of many people in the process industry, an initiative has been started to make a proposal for a new part of standard ISO 13577  “Industrial furnace and associated processing equipment — Safety — Part X: Safety of refinery heaters, pyrolysis furnaces and steam methane reformers”. For this initiative to become viable, active participation of people working in the process (petrochemical) industry is required. The new proposed part of ISO 13577 will address the same topics as in ISO 13577 Part 2 “Combustion and fuel handling systems “ and part 4 “Protective systems” but specifically and in more detail for heaters and furnaces in the process industry. Topics to be considered include:

• ignition procedure
• flame supervision
• pre-purge, air/fuel ratio
• draft/O₂/CO measurements
• process safety time
• testing
• requirements for safety assessments such as Hazop studies and SIL classification

Please contact Menno van der Bij of Technip if you would like to become involved in this challenging task and/or need more information about either opportunity mvanderbij@technip.com