Design features, facility

In a processing facility, the primary aim is to impart effective phase-contacting in the constituents within the safety and temporal constraints prescribed by the particular application. The basic design features of the equipment described in this section help to discern the performance capabilities of candidate geometries in this context. 

The protection of petroleum facilities follows the same overall philosophy that would be applied to any building or installation. These basic requirements are personnel evacuation, containment, isolation, and suppression. Since these are design features that cannot be immediately brought in at the time of an incident they must be adequately provided as part of the original facility design. What constitutes adequate is the definition fire, risk and loss protection professionals must provide. 

The regulatory environment is changing in Victoria with introduction from March 2000 of the Major Hazard Facilities Regulations, based on the Seveso II Directives. These are expected to flow on to the other states considered in this chapter. The key requirement of these regulations is the preparation of a Safety Case, which must demonstrate, among other requirements, that the risk from the new plant has been reduced to as low as is reasonably practicable - ALARP . The plants will incorporate a number of design features intended to reduce the risk from the facilities and demonstrate compliance with this criterion. 

Table 9-1 lists design features of the exposure chambers in the United States that have air-cleaning equipment. The facility at the University of Maryland Hospital, Baltimore, has a chamber with activated-charcoal and high-efficiency particle filters and controlled temperature and humidity. St. Vincent s Hospital and New York University, New York City, each have a clean-room facility. The University of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, has a self-contained, reinforced-concrete... 

Assurance of an acceptable level of surveillance for the facility by appropriate resources, procedures, and facility design features. 

The most conservative and safest potent-compound containment strategy depends on the use of engineering controls in both the processing equipment and the manufacturing facility. Specific design features of a high-containment facility should include the following 46... 

A brief, narrative description of the procedures and facility design features for the control of contamination, cross-contamination, and containment (air pressure cascades, segregation of operations and products, etc.)... 

Design features of facilities used for research on regulated chemical carcinogens or suspect chemicals are generally similar to those used for work with infectious microorganisms or the requirements recently promulgated for recombinant DNA research (8). 

These considerations determine the design features and operational requirements of the supercritical carbon dioxide system and hence its costs. Most suppliers have laboratory facilities in which a customer s parts can be tested to determine the appropriate cleaning parameters. 

If a warehouse site is prone to exposure from one or more natural perils, design features may be incorporated which mitigate the hazards. Damage potential from earthquake, flood, lightning or windstorm/hurricane may thus be reduced or eliminated. The design and construction features discussed in this section can be applied to new, and in many cases, existing facilities. 

This section concentrates on general design features. It ignores many technical details critically important to the success of a beamline. These details are generally unnoticed, and indeed should be, by an analyst visiting a user-friendly general-service facility. 

The results of these analyses are transferred electronically (via the LIMS) to workstations, where the data are validated and verified, and reports are prepared. After the data are reported and accepted by the client, sample residues are moved to the radioactive waste storage facility for disposal (see Section 13.4.5) or returned to the client. The design features of individual laboratory areas are described in Sections 13.3 to 13.6. 

Individual laboratories should be designed to be shut down individually and isolated from every other room in the event of an emergency. Valves for gas, water, and vacuum lines should be accessible through the support chase or the mechanical room penthouse. Electtical cut-off switches should be built-in at the door. These design features prevent a spill or contamination incident from affecting operations in other rooms or laboratories. Ideally, the contaminated laboratory is taken offline, decontaminated, serviced, and brought back on line with only minor impact on other facility operations. 

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