Intrinsic Safety Made Easy

This paper aims to provide a quick understanding on the concept of Intrinsically Safe, various available intrinsically safe products and their technologies used including HART and Foundation Fieldbus (FISCO solution and Fieldbus Barrier). The paper begins by introducing the origin and how the concept of Intrinsically Safe (I.S.) is started then it move on to explain how the zener and galvanical/isolation designed and its working principles with the famous ignition curves. barriers are It then attempt to provide a brief comparison on conventional point to point DIN rail mounting barrier solution to a system approach solution. The paper also provides some background on HART and points to take note when using HART and HART Mutiplexer as HART protocol has been available for quite some time. Foundation Fieldbus is a hot topic as a number of recent projects in Malaysia applied foundation Fieldbus technology. This paper outline the concept of Foundation Fieldbus and explain the different between FISCO and Fieldbus Barrier and also point to take note when selecting them.