Design Measures for Safety

Safety measures or risk-reducing measures must be considered under the aspect of inherent safety. Kletz [53], who was the promoter of these ideas for a long time, formulated some principles for reduction of risks  

Following these principles in a more specific way for polymerization reactions, three levels of priority can be defined in decreasing order, the first priority is the reduction of severity by design. As a second priority, technical measures for control of the reaction to avoid runaway should be considered. The aim is to obtain a fail safe process by reduction of the probability of occurrence of an incident. As last resort only, emergency measures should be taken in order to mitigate the consequences of runaway. In any case, the basic principle remains Avoid runaway rather than mitigate its consequences.  

With reference to this principle, different types of risk-reducing measures can be considered for polymerization reactions (Sections 11.5.4.1-11.5.4.10). 

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