Archive for the ‘Process Safety’ Category
Wednesday, September 29th, 2010
You may have read about the 2007 incident at T2 laboratories in Florida - the explosion killed four of the company's 12 employees, injured four other workers and 28 community members.
It was the 175th time the T2 personnel were running the reaction to produce methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MCMT), a gasoline additive.
What was so ...
Posted in Human Factors, Incident Investigation, Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals, Safety Culture, Safety Minute | 4 Comments »
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
The following video shows the effect of jet turbulence on underwater plume formation.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cp6fHINQ94
Posted in Consequence Modeling, Offshore, Process Safety | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
I recently wrote a guest post on Mettler Toledo's blog on theoretical ways to screen reactive chemicals. Here is a link:
http://tinyurl.com/screen-reactive-chemicals
Posted in Fires and explosions, Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Take a look at the following video and let me know what you think.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
Posted in Human Factors, Process Safety, Risk Perception, Safety Minute | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
A few weeks ago, Senator Frank Lautenberg proposed Secure Chemical Facilities Act (S. 3559) to the Senate committee on Homeland Security. The bill mandates Inherent Safer Technology (IST) or Inherently safer design (ISD) at high-risk chemical facilities.
Knowing the uncertainties surrounding the mere definition of inherent safety, one could say that it ...
Posted in Inherent Safety, Process Safety, Risk Perception, Security | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
Check valves are commonly used in the process industry for preventing back-flow or reverse flow.
Check valves achieve unidirectional flow by means of a mechanical partition - ball, diaphragm, disc.
When to Consider Check Valve Failure?
I can think of at least two occasions when you need to consider check valve failures and design for it.
Overpressure: If ...
Posted in Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
In a number of my previous blog posts, I have emphasized the disturbing trend of fires and explosions in the biodiesel and biofuel industry.
Based on the statistics, the biodiesel industry in the US is experiencing an incident every two-and-a-half months, i.e. approx. 10 weeks.
The last biodiesel incident I wrote about was in Dec. ...
Posted in Biofuels, Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Process Safety | 2 Comments »
Thursday, August 5th, 2010
Earlier this year I was in Seoul and got a chance to see Avatar 4D.
What's the 4th dimension? Moving seats, wind, water sprinkling, lasers, and synthetic smells used to enhance the movie experience.
That made me wonder, with so much advances in media/entertainment, why is most safety training so dull?
Unlike 4D Avatar that had me ...
Posted in Process Safety, Safety Culture, Training | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
Chemical processes and designs are increasingly being evaluated for inherent safety - i.e. reduce the hazard rather than the risk. The philosophy behind inherent safety is 'What You Don't Have, Can't Leak' and so you take necessary steps to reduce the hazard.
Issues where inherently safer approaches can be successfully applied are fairly ...
Posted in Inherent Safety, Process Safety, Risk Analysis | 3 Comments »
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) program is nearly two decades old and I believe that the 14 PSM elements provide a good basic framework for facilities to create a safety program.
What OSHA PSM lacks is quality metric.
Let me explain further.
For example, one of the elements of the OSHA PSM is emergency planning. As a part of ...
Posted in Emergency Response Plan, OSHA PSM, Process Safety, Regulations | 1 Comment »
