Monday, December 27th, 2010
Below is a list of top five blog posts for this year.
1. SO2 vs. H2S: Which is more toxic?
2. Physical Explosions: LNG Rapid Phase Transitions (RPT)
3. Nitrogen Asphyxiation Hazards
4. Natural Gas Pipelines: Is there a Safer Alternative?
5. 174 Times and then KaBoom
Happy holidays. See you next year.
Posted in Business Risks, Chemical Accidents, Process Safety, Risk Analysis | 1 Comment »
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, 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 »
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Last year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) is not meeting its statutory mandate by investigating major chemical accidents.
CSB’s Statutory Mandate
The Clean Air Amendment Act (CAAA) of 1990 directs CSB to
(1) investigate and report on the cause or probable cause of any accidental chemical ...
Posted in Process Safety, Regulations | 3 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 »
Sunday, March 15th, 2009
Reactivity hazards involve conversion of stored chemical energy of the components into mechanical or heat energy, andit is the uncontrolled release of this stored energy that causes the damage in a reactive chemical incident. The reactivity of a substance is normally assessed by performing calorimetric measurements.
Information about the amount of ...
Posted in Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 16th, 2009
The presence of certain functional groups is considered an indicator of reactivity. This is the simplest possible reactivity screening method and serves as a guideline for further analysis. For example, chemicals containing the following functional groups can be considered potentially reactive:
-NO2 : organic nitro compounds
-O-O-, -O-OH : organic/inorganic peroxide and ...
Posted in Fires and explosions, Process Safety, Reactive Chemicals | No Comments »
