Ray Mentzer

Texas A&M University | TAMU · Department of Chemical Engineering

Process Safety scientists in the pharmaceutical industry are tasked with keeping the laboratories, manufacturing facilities, people, and environment safe from thermal runaway reactions. This group of highly trained chemists and engineers has forged an alliance stretching across company lines to help ensure the safety of the global pharmaceutical ma...

Process safety incidents can result in injuries, fatalities, environmental impacts, facility damage, downtime & lost production, as well as impacts on a company's and industry's reputation. This study is focused on an analysis of the most commonly reported contributing factors to process safety incidents in the US chemical manufacturing industry. T...

The objective of this research is to analyse global process safety incidents within the pharmaceutical industry in terms of their consequences and factors contributing to the incidents. There were 73 process safety incidents leading to 108 fatalities found between 1985 and 2019. Trends between the number of incidents, number of fatalities, location...

Many think of process safety incidents as loss of containment events in the chemical and refining industries. In this work, we note severe/catastrophic process safety incidents across a wide spectrum of 14 industries, including agriculture, food, fireworks, manufacturing, and mining. Eighty‐one incidents were reviewed, generally at least three per...

Natural gas (NG) transmission and distribution pipelines play an integral role in the United States (US) energy infrastructure. Various incidents over the past decades have caused growing concern as to the current condition of such pipelines in the US. Significant incidents were analyzed to understand the circumstances and causes to enable one to i...

The use of metrics in risk assessment and management of chemical process systems is a well-known area of research. There are numerous sources, which provide a comprehensive list of such metrics categorized into leading or lagging and technical or social. However, the significance of these metrics to overall risk and resilience assessment of the sys...

Process safety regulations are an integral part of maintaining the safety of workers, the public, and the environment. Therefore, global regulations were analyzed to compare the extent of process safety regulations in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, China, and India. The development of regulations is typically instigated by the o...

Risk Communication is increasingly important to the chemical and manufacturing industries in the wake of a wave of major incidents in recent years. However, risk communication strategies as they are currently implemented tend to place the chemical industry on the defensive. Renewed attempts should be made to place the life-saving benefits of the ch...

A failure of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tanker can occur due to collision or loading/unloading operation resulting in spillage of LNG on water. Upon release, a spreading liquid can form a pool with rapid vaporization leading to the formation of a flammable vapor cloud. Safety analysis for the protection of public and property involves the determ...

Corrosion remains a major operational challenge within the chemical processing and petroleum industry. Left uncontrolled, corrosion may lead to the degradation of process equipment and systems, reducing their integrity (ability to perform their intended function) and making them vulnerable to failures during normal operating conditions. These equip...

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is expected to play a significant role in providing flexibility to the energy portfolio worldwide. Concerns over the safety and security of LNG facilities have prompted the need for continuous improvement of safety measures to mitigate and prevent escalation of the consequence of a LNG spill. Currently, the effectiveness...

With the expected demand of LNG to double by year 2020 worldwide, the mitigation techniques for an LNG spill emergency require further investigation to provide accurate information in evaluating the consequences of an LNG spill and the potential impact on the public safety and security. A discussion covers the use of the Fire dynamic simulator (FDS...

Mitigation measures have been categorized as one of the essential elements that require further investigation in determining the potential impact on public safety from an LNG spill. Outdoor LNG spill experiments were conducted at the Brayton Fire Training Field to verify the effectiveness of the direct application of a water spray on LNG vapors as...

Corrosion is the most significant mechanical integrity issue faced by the petrochemical industry. Even after decades of study, prevention and mitigation, it remains the leading cause of pipeline failure in the oil and gas industry. Enormous costs are directed towards repairing corrosion damage in facilities every year. In this work, one of the most...

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is expected to play a significant role in providing a diversified energy portfolio and adding flexibility to the growing demand of natural gas. With the liquefaction capacity expected to double by 2035, the concerns over the safety and security of LNG facilities have promoted continuous research on risk assessment and im...

Concerns over public safety and security of an accidental LNG spill have motivated the continued study of LNG mitigation measures. Forced dispersion of LNG vapors using a water curtain system has been proven to be effective in reducing the LNG vapor exclusion zone by enhancing the dispersion. Currently, no engineering criteria for designing effecti...

The petrochemical industry has been struggling with corrosion for decades. It is the leading cause of pipeline failures in the oil and gas industry, and therefore is responsible for a significant portion of the annual maintenance costs across the industry. Many methods of corrosion inspection have been developed but the problem still exists and cor...

A set of small-sized experiments were carried out at Texas A&M University's Brayton Fire Training Field (BFTF) to determine the radiative heat transfer of LNG pool fires. This set of experiments was designed to study how the heat feedback from the fire to the pool surface is subsequently distributed through the liquid volume. Burning rates of LNG p...

In the past, LNG research has focused on the study of dispersion models and mitigation systems, where mass rate of evaporation is one of the key parameters used in the models. Previous investigators have reported an overestimation of the mass vaporized from a LNG boiling pool compared with experimental results when calorimeters were used as an indi...

The major hazard arising from pool fires is the radiant heat from the flame reaching the surroundings. Semi-empirical and field models (computational fluids models) are used to predict this thermal hazard distance. The available semi-empirical models are the point source and solid flame model, and as semi-empirical models, they require experimental...