The SAIMC’s Tshwane/Pretoria branch is now making use of an online registration system instead of the traditional paper-based system to process registrations for events. Attendees will be able to book online, make payments where relevant and print badges.
Technical evenings
At our recent technical evening, Kevin Preston, group manager (CIS&IE) at Phoenix Contact, gave a comprehensive yet easy to follow presentation on the basics of functional safety in the process industry. This covered IEC61511 (Process Industry), which forms part of IEC61508 (Functional Safety), and showed how to identify, quantify and qualify risks in order to rate them in terms of Safety Integrity Levels (SIL). SIL 1 to 4 are in place and the higher the rating the greater the reduction of risk. He went on to introduce acronyms such as Risk Reduction Factor (RRF) and Hardware Fault Tolerance (HFT), and gave examples of how devices fail. This was extremely helpful in understanding Safe Failure Fraction (SFF) types. The terms Probability of Failure on Demand (PFD) and Safety Instrumented Function (SIF) were also introduced. Ultimately the overall SIL rating of a system is dependent on the SIL level of the lowest rated device.
Committee meeting
Prior to this month’s technical presentation, committee members met and discussed the following:
Constitution and governance: While the branch is governed in line with that of the national constitution, some branch specific aspects are not adequately addressed and hence some further consultation is needed in relation to this.
Finance and treasury: The branch will also take charge of its own finances in terms of processing and Petrus Klopper will speak to business chamber members to see if it is possible to get some help with this.
Golf day: The annual golf day will be held on 21st April.
Marketing, sales and student affairs: Mark Taylor (Dessoft) will continue to promote SAIMC via the respective channels while Pregs Naidoo (Afrilek) is looking at a model to support the uptake of members and funding. Muhammad Babamia will continue to promote SAIMC at tertiary institutions. Archie Pitso (Levivi) is to promote SAIMC at the strategic level.
Communications: Louis Hanekom (African Petrochemicals) has made a stand available to SAIMC at the company’s Secunda Roadshow and the opportunity has been passed to the local branch.
Technical events: All dates and topics are confirmed around one week prior to taking place. Meetings are held monthly on the first Wednesday of the month.
Site visits: More information will be communicated about the factory visits. Ideally it is best if students can attend. Provision is made for around 25 attendees.
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