Process Safety Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

2025, Journal of Chemical Health and Safety

Article Recommendations M any industrial chemical incidents happen around the world every year, causing fatalities, property damage, and disrupted supply chains. For example, the Tianjiayi Chemical explosion in Jiangsu, China, on March 21, 2019, at a plant producing chemical intermediates caused 78 fatalities, 76 severe injuries, 640 hospitalizations, and an estimated direct economic loss of $300 million. 1 An explosion at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, on May 3, 2019, killed four workers. 2 More recently, on July 27, 2021, an explosion at the Chempark complex in Leverkusen, Germany, caused seven fatalities and left 31 injured. 3 While these were local events, process safety incidents like these can have international consequences. For example, the Tianjiayi explosion caused disruptions for many global chemical and pharmaceutical companies who were buyers of the company's products. Systematically studying process safety performance and learning from the past is an effective way to prevent such incidents. 5 But improving process safety does not mean we need to wait to learn when the next explosion, death, or injury occurs. Instead, research that contributes to preventing process safety incidents from ever occurring is regularly published in several journals, including Organic Process Research & Development (OPR&D), ACS Chemical Health & Safety (ACS CHAS), and the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries (JLPPI). These three journals have now pooled their efforts to publish a joint Virtual Special Issue, "Process Safety from Bench to Pilot to Plant." This unique collaboration between American Chemical Society and Elsevier journals highlights work that merges natural, social, management, and engineering sciences. The scope and audience of each journal can be found online. Briefly, OPR&D publishes research on industrial process chemistry to enable safe, environmentally benign, and ultimately economical manufacturing of organic compounds in larger quantities. ACS CHAS publishes work on current and emerging technical, human, and organizational factors affecting chemical risk management, safety information, regulatory updates, effective chemical hygiene practices, safety training, and hazard assessment tools. JLPPI publishes on technical, human, and organizational process safety measures to prevent and mitigate process-related injuries and damage arising from fire, explosion, and toxic release during the use, storage, manufacture, handling, and transportation of hazardous materials. Process safety starts with students, as they are the foundation Biographies ACS Chemical Health & Safety pubs.acs.org/acschas

2025, Organic Process Research & Development

2025

The current paper describes experimental and modeling research for a series of nontraditional particulate fuel/air systems: nanomaterials, fiocculent materials and hybrid mixtures. At the time of writing, experimentation is at the following stages: (i) nanomaterials - completed with data analysis performed, (ii) fiocculent materials - completed with data analysis performed, and (iii) hybrid mixtures - underway (about 70 % completed) with data analysis in the early stages. Modeling work is also underway and includes phenomenological, thermokinetic and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) considerations

2025, Process Safety Progress

Dust explosions are a serious hazard in the process industries. They have resulted in the destruction of process plants and equipment, injury to workers, and loss of production. The five factors required for a dust explosion are: (1) fuel, (2) oxidant, (3) confinement, (4) dispersion, and (5) ignition source. These factors are often embodied in an "explosion pentagon." Disruption of any one of these factors can prevent a dust explosion from occurring. Before mitigation of a dust explosion can take place, one has to realize the full extent of the explosion potential of the dust/powder material in the intended process environment. This can be achieved by focusing on the many ways that these five components can come together in a specific process condition to form a pentagon. This risk constitutes two components: the probability of the explosion and the severity of the consequences. Both factors have to be fully realized to evaluate the dust explosion risk. Currently, standard test protocols are followed to establish a relative measure of these two factors. However, these standard test methods may not reflect the true process environment and interpretation of the results are required. The purpose of this work is to review test methodologies for assessing the magnitude of an explosion in a process environment and the ease at which the dust explosion can be initiated. This article will also critique how they may be applied to "real-world" process environments and potential mitigation steps to break the "explosion pentagon.

2025

A potential hazard can happen because of a technical and personal failures, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and fires. The potential hazards can be dangerous for human health and environment, also cause economic losses. In an industrial plant, prevention and control of these consequences have an importancy. Hazard and Operability Analysis (HAZOP) is a technique for a system evaluation and determination of risk management of hazards. In particular, HAZOP is used in order to determine potential hazards in a system and operability problems. Moreover, Areal Location of Hazardous Atmosphere (ALOHA) is the potential hazard modelling programme, which is used to plan chemical emergencies. Acetone, a colorless liquid also known as propanone, is a solvent used in manufacture of plastics and other industrial products. The most hazardous property of acetone is its flammability. Acetone is a solvent widely used in the chemical industries and stored in large volumes, therefore, acetone is a...

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in The Process Industries

Vapor barriers are widely used to contain the release of flammable mixtures in LNG facilities in the United States. The computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling tool FLACS has been validated and accepted for detailed consequence modeling of flammable vapor dispersion scenarios and includes capabilities to assess the impact of vapor barriers at varying heights and locations. While every plant design is unique and the optimization of vapor barriers often requires several iterations, guidance on where to begin is often limited. This paper will detail a parametric study on vapor barrier height and placement for different release rates to establish a basis for beginning a vapor barrier design.

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries

2025, Process Safety Progress

The objective of this investigation is the comparison of hazard operability (HAZOP) study and energy trace and barrier analysis (ETBA) in determining chemical plant hazards. The ETBA and HAZOP results were compared and contrasted. Using the HAZOP, 126 deviations were identified, while 113 hazards were identified by ETBA. HAZOP is shown to be a more effective method for recognition and prediction of hazards compared with the ETBA. However, by combining both methods, the accuracy of the evaluation is enhanced.© 2011 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog, 2011

2025, Chemical Engineering & Technology

The problem of teaching safety to chemical engineering students and the wider issue of teaching safety to all workers in the chemical and process industries is discussed. There is a need to distinguish between training and education and to appreciate the background of the learner with respect to language and prior knowledge. Some matters can only be properly understood when the individual has some industrial experience, and the traditional university method is not well suited to deal with the complex interactions on which safety depends. Methods of alleviating these difficulties are discussed, along with what should be taught, how, to whom and by whom.

2025

An engineer's paramount duty is to protect the welfare of the public. This duty includes ensuring that technical systems are designed and operated as safely as possible. This is achieved by minimizing the risk of injury or harm to people, property and the environment. Process Safety Management (PSM) is a framework for managing process risks associated with the storage, handling and manufacturing of hazardous substances, but the general principles are not industry-specific. The ultimate goal of PSM is to prevent the occurrence of major hazard incidents for the lifetime of the process, regardless of changes in personnel, organization, or environment. In PSM, a hazard incident is the unintended release of harmful substances or energy from equipment that is meant to contain it. PSM requires organizational commitment, and active participation of all stakeholders. PSM is based on process knowledge combined with systematic hazard identification and risk analysis. Risk is a measure of t...

2025, ABCM Symposium Series in Mechatronics

Actually, the safety control is one of the most important aspects studied by the international researchers, in the field of design and development of automated production systems due to social (avoid work accidents,...), economics (machine stop time reduction, increase of productivity,...) and technological aspects (less risks of damage of the components,...). Some researchers of the Engineering School of University of Minho are also studying these aspects of safety control, using simulation and modelchecking techniques in the ...

2025, Process Safety Progress

Deficiencies in conduct of operations and operational discipline can lead to a decline in the quality of an organization's process safety culture and an increase in the likelihood of process safety incidents. A process safety assessment is one tool especially suited for identifying and correcting organizational safety culture deficiencies. Both AIChE/CCPS and API offer recent guidance documents on how to conduct effective assessments of process safety management systems. This article first introduces some basic concepts from game theory and applies them to the methodology of process safety assessments. A conceptual framework for the implementation of the process safety assessment process with balanced positive and corrective actions will be described. Assessment guidelines typically focus on the negative outcomes-correcting deficiencies. This article argues that the assessment process must also use the positive outcomes-the compliance successes-to provide positive reinforcement to the process safety culture. Implementing this strategy is consistent with pragmatic management practices and is supported by empirical studies in behavioral science. Finally, this article discusses how these ideas fit within the framework of AIChE/CCPS and API guidance documents. V C 2013

2025, E3S Web of Conferences

The paper considers accidents and potential hazards of the world chemical enterprises, and provides statistics of accidents and human casualties. The authors investigate harmful factors affecting the production process and a human-operator, showing the central role of a human in the technological process (both as a source of errors and as an active element that eliminates errors, failures and cyber attacks’ consequences). We essentially consider automated technological complex as a Human-Machine-Environment system, thus a human-system approach should be applied. The authors developed a complex of systemic components and morphological models, which describe the human-machine system in the sections required for analysis, to ensure sustainable and reliable design with initial data. The authors also propose a method and information technology for interfaces’ ergonomic assessment; the principles for adaptive interfaces design; and mathematical models and information technology to assess ...

2025, International Journal of Social Science Research and Review (IJSSRR)

Workplace safety and health (WSH) are increasingly recognized as vital components of organizational success, particularly in high-risk sectors such as manufacturing and construction in Malaysia. Despite the existence of comprehensive regulations like OSHA 1994, many companies still struggle with inadequate safety practices, leading to frequent accidents and costly disruptions. This research addresses the gap in the literature regarding the direct relationship between effective WSH practices and business outcomes, particularly in terms of profitability and productivity. The primary objective of this study is to investigate how hazard identification and risk mitigation strategies can enhance organizational performance. To achieve this, a qualitative methodology was employed, involving semi-structured interviews with safety managers, HR personnel, and compliance officers from six organizations. The findings reveal a significant positive correlation between comprehensive safety protocols and improved business performance. Companies that prioritize WSH report enhanced employee morale, reduced absenteeism, and increased productivity. Furthermore, organizations with strong safety cultures experience lower turnover rates and substantial cost savings from decreased insurance claims and legal fees. The implications of this research are profound, suggesting that businesses must integrate WSH as a core element of their operational strategy. By doing so, organizations comply with regulations and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This study highlights that investing in workplace safety is not merely a legal obligation but a strategic imperative that drives long-term success and sustainability in the evolving industrial landscape of Malaysia

2025, International Journal of Social Science Research and Review

2025, HSE Interview Preparation Topics

Industrial operations, spanning oil and gas, construction, and maintenance, face multifaceted safety challenges that necessitate robust health, safety, and environment (HSE) protocols. This paper synthesizes a comprehensive guide covering 74 critical topics, including confined space safety, hydro-jetting, crane lifting, H2S management, scaffolding standards, and emergency response procedures. Through an analysis of hazards, control measures, and procedural frameworks such as risk assessments (HIRA), job safety analysis (JSA), and permit-to-work (PTW) systems, the study proposes an integrated HSE management model. Emphasis is placed on worker training, equipment certification, and real-time monitoring to mitigate risks and enhance operational safety. The findings offer a scalable framework for industries to standardize HSE practices, reduce incidents, and ensure regulatory compliance.

2025, Chemical engineering transactions

Industrial safety performance has, for a long time, been the domain of health and safety specialists, measuring injury and absenteeism rates to discover patterns and trying to prevent accidents from happening. The drawback of this approach is that safety is reactive to accidents, mostly caused by operations. As a result, safety (performance) has become the reverse side of operations (performance) and is often seen as a hinderance in making the best possible profit for organisations. However, now already for a period of time, industries have become aware of the possible benefits of a more proactive approach towards safety. Therefore, increasingly more organisations are looking for more proactive methods in measuring and achieving safety performance. As a result, in recent years, important efforts have been undertaken to improve the understanding of safety culture and safety climate and how to measure these concepts in organisations, for instance in the process industry and chemical p...

2025

An embedded test system to assess the dynamic performance of a process plant is proposed. A simple Process rate controller plant and a simple chemical plant are taken as models and the test systems are synthesized. In each system a virtual plant performing all tasks of real time plant is emulated and an analysis package to assess the performance is incorporated. The virtual plant is synthesized to provide anticipated ideal behavior and outcome of the plant. The responses obtained at selected output terminals of the real time plant and virtual plant are compared and analyzed in the analysis package of the test system. The test results assess the performance of the real time plant and suggest possible modifications to its electronic hardware and programs as to improve the dynamic performance of the real time plant.

2025, Process Safety and Environmental Protection

ore than 50 000 wastewater treatment plants are operating in the European Union, producing more than 7.9 million tons of dry solids per year. The amount of sewage sludge will continue to increase as the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directives continues to be implemented in the different member countries. It is now undeniable that various toxic organic compounds, such as surfactants, hydrocarbons and residues derived from plastics are found in sewage sludge. The BIOWASTE project, under the EU 5th framework programme, offers an integrated study of xenobiotics throughout sludge recycling, using a combination of complementary approaches such as biotechnology, eco-toxicology, plant toxicology, analytical chemistry, microbiology, mathematical modelling, life cycle costing and life cycle analysis. This paper presents an overview of the results as well as their implication on the current EU regulatory work in progress concerning sewage sludge application. Particularly, two major findings are here detailed: the isolation, characterization and use of anaerobic xenobiotic-degrading microorganisms, and the modelling of the fate and impact of xenobiotics on anaerobic digestion.

2025, Process Safety and Environmental Protection

2025, Safety Science

Recent disasters in high hazard industries such as Oil and Gas Exploration (The Deepwater Horizon) and Petrochemical production (Texas City) have been found to have causes that range from direct technical failures through organizational shortcomings right up to weak regulation and inappropriate company cultures. Risk models have generally concentrated upon technical failures, which are easier to construct and for which there is more concrete data. The primary causes lie firmly rooted in the culture of the organization and determine the way in which individuals go about risky activities. Modelling human activities, especially collectively rather than individual human errors as is done in most human models, is a quite different proposition, in which complex interactions between different individuals and levels change over time as success and failure alter the pattern of payoffs. This paper examines the development of a dynamic integrated model for risk in a real-time environment for the hydrocarbon industry. It is based originally on the CATS model for commercial aviation safety, which first attempted to address some of these problems in a relatively simple way. Aviation is, however, a relatively simple activity, with large numbers of common components in a constrained environment. The Oil and Gas industry is significantly more diverse, covering the gamut from exploration, drilling, production, transport, refining and chemical production, each with its own potential for large scale disaster, but in the case of an integrated oil company all run by individuals within a common company culture.

2025, II INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC FORUM ON COMPUTER AND ENERGY SCIENCES (WFCES-II 2021)

A conventional process design lifecycle starts with a screening process of alternative chemical reaction pathways until the detailed design of the entire plant. During the design of the process, mainly the flow diagram of the process, errors may arise due to wrong decisions and basis made such as unsuitable process condition, construction material and etc., which will later cause problems to the following stages of the process lifecycle. Despite the availability of various methods, a proper detailed framework which guides users in selecting the appropriate method for their safety assessment based on input data availability is still missing. Therefore, this paper aims to address the above issue by proposing a systematic framework for safety assessment based on process information generated from PFDs during the preliminary design stage. The research on R & D and basic engineering design is currently on-going to develop the entire framework and will be presented in other papers. Technically, the framework is developed based on the methods screened to be suitable for application within the PFD-based context in any chemical processing plant. The framework also provides recommendations on the strategies for reducing the safety hazard and risk in the process in the respective design stage. A case study on process design of biorefineries is conducted to illustrate the functionality and benefit of the proposed framework.

2025, Journal of Engineering and Technological Sciences

In any new chemical process development and design, process safety is a critical aspect to be considered besides economic and technical feasibility of the manufacture of the product. A lack of proper hazard assessment during the design phase may later result in accidents with disastrous consequences to workers, the public as well as the environment. Many methods have been introduced to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the safety level of processes. Despite the availability of a large amount of methods, a systematic framework that details guidelines for hazard identification, risk assessment, safety measure design, and safe critical decision-making is still missing. To address this issue, the main objective of this study was to propose a systematic framework that outlines comprehensive guidelines for assessing the safety performance of processes based on information from the piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID). Apart from proposing the framework, appropriate strategies for minimizing safety hazards and risks are also recommended. In addition, the user is assisted in selecting the most appropriate assessment method according to his or her needs and the scope and constraints of the assessment. A case study is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed framework.

2025, Chemical engineering transactions

Process safety assessment is one of the most powerful approaches that can be used to communicate the strategies of hazard identification as well as risk assessment in the chemical process industry. Process safety has been introduced decades ago. Its importance and needs have become more obvious due to the constant increase of plant operation scales in the process industries. The increasing scale of process plant can be especially dangerous due to the presence of additional or higher magnitude of hazards. Between years 1996 and 2014, study shows that there are various methods that have been developed for the assessment of process safety including qualitative, quantitative as well as the combination of both. Despite the availability of an enormous number of methods, there is no detailed guideline on how to select which is the most suitable one that suits the scope, nature, interest and constraint of the assessment. This has led to slow adoption of detailed assessment (especially inher...

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in The Process Industries

This paper presents a method based on a genetic algorithm for optimizing process plant layout. The relative location of main process units is determined to minimize an annual cost function including the cost of material transfer between process units (piping and pumping costs), land cost, and the expected annual loss resulting from damage to each secondary unit caused by primary accidents occurring in nearby process units. This method is an improvement over previous attempts using genetic algorithms or mathematical programming techniques to optimize plant layout, which neglected pumping costs and included safety issues by evaluating the infringement of predefined safety distances only. In this approach the operating cost of material transfer is included and the likelihood of accidents is taken into account thus providing good practical solutions to the plant layout problem incorporating more realistic cost functions and constraints. In the paper, after discussing the structure of the annual cost function and describing the working logic of the layout generating algorithm, a case study is described to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

2025

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries

2025, Reliability Engineering & System Safety

Toxic gas leakage represents a type of major process accident scenario threatening human life. Technical and non-technical safety barriers are employed to prevent toxic gas leakage accidents or mitigate the possible catastrophic consequences. Evacuation must be executed in severe toxic gas release scenarios. The performance assessment of technical safety barriers and evacuations in these accident scenarios, although very important, has never been investigated in previous studies. This paper proposes an approach integrating event tree analysis (ETA), computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, and evacuation modeling (EM), for risk assessment of toxic gas leakage accidents in chemical plants. In the proposed approach, the spatiotemporal distribution of toxic gas is predicted by CFD simulations. A dynamic evacuation is determined by a cellular automaton (CA)-based model. Synergistic interventions resulting from technical safety barriers and evacuations are considered in the risk assessment. Considering safety barrier failures in the event tree analysis, individual fatality risks due to toxic gas leakage scenarios are calculated. For illustrative purposes, the proposed method is applied to a case of ammonia leakage. The results show that worse scenarios would be ignored without considering the failure probabilities of technical safety barriers, which can cause underestimated individual fatality risks. Timely gas detection & alarm has the potential to expedite the starting time of evacuations and thus may shorten the time that evacuees stay in the toxicity area to reduce individual fatality risks.

2025, Reliability Engineering & System Safety

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries

In this paper we show the integration of techniques for early fault detection and diagnosis of operational faults in industrial processes, and we show an application example in a Fluid Catalytic Cracking refinery process. The early fault detection and diagnosis allow the operators in an industrial process to take the best actions during the real state of the process, avoiding incipient faults to scale to critical situations where there is risk of human lives and economical lost.

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in The Process Industries

Special issue of the journal on loss prevention in the process for the world conference on Chemical Engineering in 2017 in Barcelona, Spain According to the Declaration of Barcelona on occasion of the 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering held between 1 October and October 5, 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, the promotion of safety, like the conservation and care of global resources, health, and the environment, is one of the four key-points to improve the quality of life, foster employment, advance economic and social development and protect the planet through sustainable development. The Declaration of Barcelona signed by the President of the "World Council of Chemical Engineering" and the presidents of its members, "European Federation of Chemical Engineering", "Inter-American Confederation for Chemical Engineering" and "Asia Pacific Confederation of Chemical Engineering" together with the president of the "European Society of Biochemical Engineering Sciences", the Congress Chair and the Scientific & Technical Program Chair, is the roadmap for Chemical Engineers to be followed in the next years. It is very important that the declaration focus its attention on the promotion of safety because it reflects by one side the attention that all chemical engineers pay to design safe processes and by other that, it is something that never could be set aside, that never should stop to consider. Despite all efforts made on regulations, best practices and management systems, accidents still occur. Why? May be, because they are as an addition of many small miss functions; or because they are the * Corresponding author.

2025, DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals)

The false perception that the risk operating with bio-refineries, as opposed to traditional petroleum refineries is lower has led to a lack of specific safety requirements in the field of bio-energy, even when considering the fact that the major parts of these plants are small scale and are below the threshold values for the application of Seveso directives. In this context, a thorough analysis of accidents related to the production of bio-energy is here performed and, specifically, a comparison between Europe and USA. The gathered information is comprised of general data, including activity, location, type of accidents, causes, injuries and fatalities; the aim is to build a useful instrument of analysis, in order to investigate and identify the main and recurrent hazards in the area, as well as to implement risk assessment tools and become aware of the gap between Europe and America. The frequency analysis and the assessment through the use of a rapid risk matrix, confirm that a non-negligible risk profile may be attributed to bio-energy industries. Safety culture in bio-energy production is an issue of primary importance, as well as the need for extending accident investigation, looking beyond the immediate technical causes for ways of avoiding the hazards and for deficiencies in the management system.

2025, Journal of Loss Prevention in The Process Industries

2025, Chemical Engineering Research & Design

2025

PresentationCorporations have been consistently involved in the areas of process safety, people safety and risk management for several decades. These corporations have witnessed major and minor incidents, and their learnings have been consistently captured under various initiatives, some of which have also been responsible for introducing new regulatory regimes and have been game changers for the way companies operate. Another trend, emerged in the industries is the concept of sustainability. Corporations have begun emphasizing their sustainability performance is tied into their safety program (process and people) which assists in reaching their goal of operational excellence. Hence, when a robust proactive risk management exercise is initiated during the concept of inception of the facility, and then carried out effectively and continuously until the demolition and decommissioning of the facility, it renders success towards the excellence program. Another key component for success ...

2025, Journal of The Institution of Engineers (India): Series D

2025

The past forty (40) years have witnessed an extraordinary promulgation of safety regulations and associated “safety management systems”, which has resulted in the improvement in personal and process Safety Performance (SP). Over the last 10-20 years SP has plateaued – “Progress on safety beyond 10-7 is elusive.” – and significant events continue to occur, and at sites with “excellent” safety records. Michael Marshall describes much of the history of how Process Safety Management (PSM) regulations came into existence and the positive impact it has had on “regulated sites”. He concludes this overview with: “… we are committed to continuous improvement, so where do we go from here?” [Emphasis added.]
Much published research and numerous books have advocated an alternative approach or “new view” to improving SP, recognizing and exploring such aspects as human performance, mental models, human error, organizational accidents, safety engineering and high reliability organization (HRO) practices. The “old view” is largely based on “compliance” (bureaucratic paperwork & enforcement, “management systems” and “error or deviance tracking”), whereas the “new view” is based on “capacity” or “competence” that is imbedded in and reflected by the People at the “sharp end” through their identification and addressing of safety issues on their own initiative – “… safety is not just the absence of harm; safety is the presence of operational capacity”. While not advocating complete abandonment of the activities that have gotten the Process Industries (PI) to where it is today, the “new view” highlights its shortcomings and the changes in perspective, attitude and practices required to have measurable improvements in SP beyond the 10-7 rate. Nevertheless, the PI has yet to embrace, much less pursue, this new perspective and seemingly prefers to take the position of doing “more of the same”, all the while expecting the outcomes to change.
This paper is intended to spur introspection regarding the underlying assumptions about how SP is achieved and to generate brutally honest, even heated, debate about the organizational and cultural changes – the mindset, policies & practices, and leadership philosophies throughout all levels of PI organizations – which the “new view” says are required to achieve the ever-elusive goal of Zero. In addition to the improvements in SP, the paper also proposes that, if/when the “new view” is pursued in earnest, there will be other positive business outcomes such as improved uptime, reduced break-in work, improved schedule and cost performance in turn-arounds, and fewer unplanned outages, all of which improve profit. Such collateral benefits have also been acknowledged by others: “… the use of resources while dealing with multiple goals does not create only safety… but collectively contributes to… other business outcomes”.

2025, IEEEXplore

The article presents a theoretical introduction and
simulation results of the thermal impact of lightning current
on metal roofing. Lightning discharge, characterized by a high
current peak, is a severe fire or explosion hazard source, even
at a relatively short duration. Based on real-world solutions, a
digital model was defined in the Ansys Multiphysics environment,
and then a simulation analysis was performed using it. Analytical
calculations verified the obtained results.

2024, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries

Indicators for process safety can provide insight into safety levels of a process or of a company, but it is clear that the 'silver bullet ' has not yet been identified. In secondary literature a difference is made between leading and lagging safety indicators. Primary literature questions this distinction, as well as the quantification of safety indicators. Safety Indicators for management and organisation have an ambiguous relationship with latent errors and conditions, being mentioned over and over in retrospective safety analyses of major accidents. Indicators for occupational safety do not necessarily have a relationship with process safety. In addition, it can be expected that regulators of major hazard companies will ask to identify and implement both lagging and leading indicators, and anchor these indicators in a safety management system. Therefore, the subject 'safety indicators' will remain in the spotlight, at least in the time to come.

2024, Process Safety Progress

2024, Organic Process Research & Development

2024, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries

Since the inception of the process industries, there have been a great number of process incidents causing significant loss of life and property damage. Even the establishment and implementation of a series of rigorous regulations has not prevented the occurrence of process incidents. In order to protect people, property and the environment a more robust safety program is needed and the safety performance of process industries must continue to improve. In this work, the common ground and the unique characteristics of process safety engineering (PSE) and fire protection engineering (FPE) is reviewed to demonstrate the potential benefits of unifying the two fields or improving the coordination between them to create a more robust safety program, thereby enhancing the safety performance of process industries. Recommendations are made to facilitate and encourage continued discussion and efforts toward the integration of process safety engineering and fire protection engineering.

2024, Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology

Purpose-This paper aims to report on the development of a model to improve process health and safety within the context of a petrochemical environment to achieve a generative health and safety culture within that sector. Design/methodology/approach-A quantitative research methodology and deductive research approach were used in the study. A survey was conducted in a major petrochemical enterprise in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa with 259 returned and duly completed questionnaires. The data was statistically analysed using statistical packages for social science version 25. Findings-This study found that the key process health and safety critical drivers needed to grow a generative process health and safety culture were leadership commitment, chemical exposure management, health and safety risk assessment, process hazard analysis and permit to work. Research limitations/implications-This study was conducted in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa within the petrochemical industry. Because of self-reported methods of data collection, there is a probability of bias existing in the results of the study. Practical implications-The contribution of this research is to understand, based on theoretical assumptions, how health and safety improvement could be institutionalised in an organisation. The developed model can be used as a practical tool. Social implications-This paper is part of the larger discussion of increasing importance in health and safety policy-making. This study aims at contributing to the literature in the field of health and safety by incorporating the drivers towards a generative process health and safety culture. Originality/value-This study provides a model to assist senior management to reduce exposure to process health and safety hazards in the petrochemical industry and improve overall performance.

2024

This paper describes a new method for developing and refining the categories into which the concepts of a collection of concept maps may be classified. The method is used to develop a set of ten categories into which concepts relating to the domain of ‘process safety’ may be assigned. The categories created were used to analyse 103 concept maps that were generated by second year undergraduate chemical engineering students. The method involved defining ten different categories into which the process safety concepts could be assigned. Each map was then analysed independently by three different assessors who each bring different perspectives on the topic to the analysis. Each assessor assigned every concept of each of the maps to one of the ten categories. The disagreements that inevitably occurred between the three assessors were then analysed using a novel three-way table. A close analysis of the disagreements aided by the new table allowed each of the categories to be more closely d...

2024, IFAC Proceedings Volumes

Safety process control of storage facilities represents the trend for down stream industries, due to high costs that traditional operation implies. Also, maintenance of old facilities is very poor and poses hazards and risks to the safety of operators and surrounding communities. Complete safety and security concepts for the process control can mitigate the need for 24/7 safety operation, increase availability and reliability. Knowledge and experience are key factors involved in the studies and analyses that lead to efficient safety instrumented systems design and implementation.

2024, Sustainability

Industry and related work and workplaces are constantly changing as a result of the implementation of new technologies, substances and work processes, changes in the composition of the workforce and the labor market, and new forms of employment and work organization. The implementation of new technologies represents certain ambivalence. Next to the positive impact on workers' health, new risks and challenges can arise in the area of process and occupational safety and health of people at work. On these bases, it follows the need for predicting and handling the new risks, in order to ensure safe and healthy workplaces in the future. The aim of most forecasting studies is not only to identify new emerging risks, but also to foresee changes that could affect occupational safety and health. However, a number of questions still require proper investigation, i.e., "What impact do new emerging risks have on tertiary education in the area of Safety engineering? Has tertiary education already reacted to progress in science and research and does it have these innovations in its syllabus? How are tertiary graduates prepared for the real world of new technologies?" This paper represents a first attempt in the literature to provide answers to the raised questions, by a survey approach involving academics, Health Safety and Environment (HSE) industrial experts and university students in the Czech Republic. Even if statistical evaluation is limited to a single Country and to a small sample size, the obtained results allow suggesting practical recommendations that can contribute to ensuring new challenges in the area of education by addressing relevant culture issues needed to support new workplace realities according to the newly defined Safety 4.0.