Process Safety - Science topic

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Hello,

I'm looking for a process safety management implemented in a company (the name of the company doesn't matter)

if anyone of you have one please send it to me on:

thanks.

Yes

Hi all,

I am interested in quantifying this loss. I am also investigating the composition of this loss.

Regards

In terms of maintenace, sub-tipic can be;

1. Machine interlock;

2. Lockout and Tagout, physical and soft both;

3. Inherent potential risk of radiation, eg. x-ray, LASER, radio isotop etc..

4. Invisible stored energy.. eg. static electricity, spring energy, pressurised gas, air etc..

Dear Dorothea.

Accidents at work is not necessarily what Muhammad is looking for. Many of these are personal injuries. Process safety incidents are events caused by abnormalities in the process, e.g. loss of primary containment or run away reaction. Personal injuries may og may not be involved.

Muhammed refer to leading and lagging indicators. For refineries and chemical plants the CCPS have defined such indicators, and there has been some discussion of American Chemistry Council of publishing industry wide trends. Companies generally don't share values of leading and lacking indicators publicly, although there are exceptions. One is Dow Chemical.

Dear Sir, Greetings of the day! Thanks for your reply. I have 2 questions in mind. 1. How can I make general leading and lagging indicators which would be applicable to all chemical industries? 2. May I use Delphi Technique for making consensus on leading and lagging indicators instead of AHP? Kindly help me in this regard. Thanking you in anticipation

 Dear Yasir, 

Your question mentions Hazard Elimination Techniques. In general hazard elimination is not a relevant issue as many hazards are simply present as a result of substances (raw materials and products) choices, process choices, equipment design, the environment in which the operation is planned, etc.

Hazard identification is the first step, for which tools are available, such as BowTie based investigation (https://www.cgerisk.com/knowledgebase/The_bowtie_method). Based on  the identified hazards and possible control and/or mitigation measures the remaining risks must be determined. This means that for specific hazards (fire, explosion / detonation, run-away, intoxication, fatalities, soil / surface water / ground water pollution, falling from height, high/low pressure, wrong product quality, process changes, poor maintenance, etc, etc) specific expertise might be required. A major part of my job is

The crucial question in Process Safety Management processes is identifying the acceptable level of risk. However low the risk can be made, there will always be a residual risk which might result in catastrophic incidents.

Based on many incident investigations and PSM studies I have been involved in, my experience is that incidents do happen, but the severity of the incidents must be reduced as reasonable as possible. This also means that safe rescue activities (fire brigade, medical services, etc) after a calamity should also be taken into account.

From my website (www.doktersadvice.com):

Basis for Risk Management in general are the following steps:

 • Know the hazards and threats that may cause problems for both activities and organization

 • Identify events that may jeopardize the normal operation

• Inventorize the available controls that could prevent or limit undesirable events and ensure proper functioning of these controls (prevention).

 • Identify consequences of the most threatening events.

 • Inventorize protection and mitigation measures/defenses that might limit the consequences (repression).

 • Take appropriate actions (including incident analysis) to ensure that all controls and defenses are functioning as intended.

 Ok thanks. Let me know when the data is available. We might be still interested.

I want to know the methods and ideas for the quantitative research study of leading and lagging indicators.

Yasir

You need to first state the Research question that you are answering about Process safety leading indicators and isolate the dependent and independent variables.  It is only then that you can decide on the best method to apply, because it varies by the way the question is stated.  Read the articles on this subject they will also guide you

 Hi Mehmood,

I assume the context of your question is harm to workers, public and the environment. The UK HSE states risk less than 10^-3 /annum impairment is tolerable. This means that the number of fatality should be less than one per 1000 years. You must spend as much as necessary to achieve this requirement, since otherwise HSE won’t issue a permit to operate the installation.

However, this is not the end of the dialogue with HSE. You must also prove the risk is as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP). UK regulations require that you must improve the safety until the cost of improvement is disproportionate with befit it gives.

You other question “Long term planning to avoid extra shutdowns in operations…” is in fact asset protection and HSE is not interested, as this is not a public safety issue. This is up to the owner to decide to spend now or later. You have to calculate which of these two option is cheaper considering the probability of events.

You can find more details in my papers that you can on Researchgate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sirous_Yasseri/publications

Best regards

Sirous yasseri

Well, i had been reading the comments all the way, from the day i posted the question.. And all the answer and comment have been so helpful to me, and almost clarified most of the things.  

Thanks alot Niels Jensen, for the example and giving a very good  explanation. 

Hi Akilan,

to what I have understood in ideal system, isothermal expansion energy is the energy needed to expand the thermodynamic system by keeping the system's temperature constant (no change in internal energy). Suppose that the system is thermally isolated from its surroundings and if the system is allowed to expand quasi-statically under these adiabatic conditions then it performs work on its environment, its internal energy is suppressed, and its temperature is altered. Nonetheless, there is almost no ideal system in practical application.

Making a questionnaire

If you use a Bayesian Belief Net for the consequence (event) tree you can have distributed conséquences and update the distribution as more info becomes available. see (as a starter) 2009 B.J.M. Ale, L.J. Bellamy, R. van der Boom, J. Cooper, R.M. Cooke, L.H.J. Goossens, A.R. Hale, D. Kurowicka, O. Morales, A.L.C. Roelen, J. Spouge, Further development of a Causal model for Air Transport Safety (CATS): Building the mathematical heart, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, Volume 94, Issue 9, September 2009, Pages 1433-1441

Safety and reliability are different properties which may be supporting or conflicting. Increasing the reliability of a safety function can make an entire system safer. On the other hand, some forms of redundancy will actually increase safety at the expense of reliability, or increase reliability at the expense of safety.

The distinction is clearest if you imagine non-safety ways in which a system must be reliable. For example, an aeroplane needs to be available to fly. It could be quite safe if it never took off, but that wouldn't be considered reliable. Alternatively, it could reliably transport passengers from place to place, but kill one or two every flight. That would be reliable but not safe.

Your sub-question is actually a separate issue. Safety is with respect to absolute intent, not requirements or design. A system can behave exactly as specified or designed, and still be unsafe. You don't necessarily need a component failure to cause a dangerous behaviour. There are also component failures which case the system to fail against its requirements, but not in an unsafe way.

Quality is a broader concept than safety. Quality implies identify customer requirements; defining objectives and indicators for their measurement; designing processes for achieving these objectives; assigning resources required to carry out these processes; executing this processes according their design; measuring the processes performance, and establishing a continuous improvement process for preventing and correcting non-conformities.

Safety refers to identify hazards of processes, their causes and potential consequences; to estimate and evaluate their risks; to establish actions for avoiding, preventing or reducing the probability of their occurrence, as well as contingency plans to mitigate losses and damages in the case of the occurrence of risks.

Quality is an integrationist concept. Safety is an attribute of quality; as well as it is also itself an objective of quality. Safety should be integrated into process management. Therefore, when we refer to quality concept, the safety is implicit in it.