Testing Requirements for Plant-Wide Gas Detectors

Which government? The U.S.?

Yes in the US

yes in the us is there a certain time frame?

Guest -

OSHA is the "primary" regulatory agency that involves occupational and industrial safety.

OSHA's goal is to limit employee exposure to levels below their established "Threshold Limit Values (TLV's)" for hazardous gases. For example exposure to ethylene oxide over an eight-hour period is one ppm.

As long as readings fall below these established values, companies are required to perform these monitoring tasks periodically. However, in areas considered to be "hot spots," a company may be required to monitor continuously.

Bottom line, the regulation is typically dictated by the scenario as far as reporting is concerned. Where data collection (monitoring) is concerned, the best alternative is to have a plant wide historian that polls gas levels every 5 to 10 seconds and stores the data into a database for future reporting. In this way, you never have to worry about having the data in the event of an "incident." There also must be a way to manually enter gas level readings for those devices that do not have the ability to interface the historian. This is typically done by your lab, and then could be inserted into the database as well.

I would recommend looking at the OSHA website for guidance on the particular gas types, and then to your safety and regulation department for frequency of OSHA / FED reporting.

Always check the manufacturer's recommendations. We generally recommend that our gas detectors be calibrated/tested at least once every 90 days to ensure integrity. This should be used as a guideline only and in some applications more frequent calibrations may be required. Each application must be carefully evaluated to determine the frequency of calibration. Calibration checks merely ensure the integrity and operation of the life protecting equipment.

www.generalmonitors.com

The govt does not determine the frequency, you do. As stated before start with the manufactures recommendations and your application and set up your own program. If it is a PSM (Process Safety Management) location than it needs to be part of the written protion of the Mechanical Integrraty program, especially if you declared it as a layer of protection in the PHA (Process Hazard An) process.

As far as we know, the US government does not stipulate the maintenance cycle of gas detectors. ISA and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have issued guidelines that define detection specifications, but defer to manufacturers on how detection equipment ought to be maintained. The Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) writes in one instance, "Monitoring equipment should be serviced, calibrated, and tested as recommended by the equipment manufacturer.*" ISA makes a similar point: "After installation on site each [combustible] sensor should be calibrated according to the manufacturer's instructions.**"

* API RP 49, "Recommended Practice for Drilling and Well Servicing Operations Involving Hydrogen Sulfide," (March 2007). Sec. 6.5: Equipment Calibration and Testing.

** ANSI/ISA-RP12.1.02-2003 (IEC 61779-6 Mod), "Recommended Practice for the Installation, Operation, and Maintenance of Combustible Gas Detection Instruments," 26 February 2003. Sec. 6.9.2 (Initial Gas Calibration).