Archive for the ‘Reactive Chemicals’ 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 »
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 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 »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
I recently came across a very interesting incident involving foam concrete.
Foam concrete is produced by mechanical mixing of foam prepared in advance with concrete mixture, and not with the help of chemical reactions. At the incident site, two workers were removing steelwork using angle grinders while the foam concrete was ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Incident Investigation, Reactive Chemicals | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
The reactivity of a chemical or a mixture is normally assessed by thermal analysis. Thus the thermal analysis data forms the basis of risk mitigation decisions. What does the thermal analysis data tell us and how to base risk mitigation decisions? How to tell which compositions are more reactive and ...
Posted in Reactive Chemicals | No Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
During process development or plant operation it is often necessary to estimate energy of reaction based on chemical formulae representation alone. This heat of decomposition represents the potential energy that can be released and is therefore a measure of explosion potential. One can therefore envision that estimation of heats reaction ...
Posted in Reactive Chemicals | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Evaluation of reactive chemical hazards can range from simple paper-based calculations to highly complex testing and modeling. This post is aimed to help you formulate a systematic strategy for evaluating reactive chemical hazards in your facility. I will divide the various approaches in three tiers - simple to complex.
Tier I . Theoretical Screening
At the ...
Posted in Reactive Chemicals | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Recently, members of Congress sent a letter to OSHA chief, Jordan Barab, to expand PSM standard to address reactive chemicals.
Reactive chemicals have gained increasing attention since the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) released its report on reactive chemicals in 2002. Now I have been working in the area of reactive chemicals ...
Posted in OSHA PSM, Reactive Chemicals, Regulations | No Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
Reactive chemicals refer to chemicals that can react with self or with other chemicals or contaminants leading to extremely high reaction rates. The high reaction rates in turn can lead to overpressure within the vessel and possible explosion. As a graduate student, I looked at behavior of reactive chemical hydroxylamine ...
Posted in Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
The biodiesel and biofuel industry is demonstrating a disturbing trend of unsafe operations. The biodiesel industry is experiencing one fire/explosion incident EVERY two-and-a-half months. Last Friday, there was an explosion at a biodiesel plant in Chicago injuring two workers. The following video from NBC provides details of the incident.
http://tinyurl.com/lmpug7
According to the video, the explosion ...
Posted in Biofuels, Reactive Chemicals | 1 Comment »
