Industrial processes, safe design

Windhorst, J. C. A. (1995). Application of Inherently Safe Design Concepts, Fitness for Use and Risk Driven Design Process Safety Standards to an LPG Project."loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries, ed. J. J. Mewis, H. J. Pasman, and E. E. De Rademacker, 543-54. Amsterdam Elsevier Science B. V. 

Sometimes it is impossible to effectively design out waste, and safe means have to be found to dispose of it. Many industrial processes produce relatively high levels of waste in a finely divided or dispersed form, such as ash, contaminated soil, treatment sludges, and so forth. This contaminated material is difficult to handle and process. A common approach to tackling this problem is to stabihse and sohdify the waste using a binder that immobilises contaminants within a hard matrix. This does not destroy the contaminants, but keeps them from moving into the surroimding environment. 

Balemans, A. W. M. (1974) Check-lists guide lines for safe design of process plants. Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries, C. H. Bushmann (ed.) (Elsevier). 

Much effort is expended to design and install a safe industrial process. A great deal of information has been developed and obtained about the process. This has been used to develop process-specific information such as safe upper and lower operating limits and operating procedures, and to reduce the risks to as low a level as is reasonably practicable. 

Probably the most important aspect of reactor design and control for a substantial number of industrial processes involves heat transfer, that is, maintaining stable and safe temperature control. Temperature is the dominant variable in many chemical reactors. By dominant variable, we mean it plays a significant role in determining the economics, quality, safety, and operability of the reactor. The various heat transfer methods for chemical reactors are discussed in a qualitative way in this chapter, while subsequent chapters deal with these issues in detail with several illustrative quantitative examples. 

In all industrial processes, the safety of operators and staff, as well as the general public in surrounding areas, is of paramount importance. Every effort should be made during design and construction to ensure that the bioseparation plant is safe to operate with all risks identified and minimized through appropriate precautions. 

Storage of liquid materials in a typical process industry is carried out in tanks classified as spherical or vertical and horizontal cylindrical. Since safety is an important consideration in storage tank design, the National Fire Protection Association and the American Petroleum Institute publish rules for safe design and operation. Vertical tanks are most commonly used for outdoor storage for such materials as petroleum products. Water towers are typical of elevated vertical tank outdoor construction. They are used for maintaining a uniform head of water to store water for temporary emergencies and for fire protection. Hori-... 

The objective of scale-up and process development in the pharmaceutical industry is ° "... designing to operate a process safely and cost effectively with predictable results at the scale of choice, by making best use of data and knowledge available at a certain time. ... 

Wind turbine blades represent one of the success stories for the RP industry with increasing market demand for longer blades. This has caused designers to incorporate carbon fibers adding stiffness, while blade manufacturers are moving away from wet lay-up processes to ensure that the several tonnes of materials that make up a blade can be processed safely and quickly. As a result the raw materials have changed from wet-lay up systems to prepregs and both wet and dry infusion materials (Chapters 4 and 5). 

The basic premise of behavior modification programs is that the primary cause of accidents is worker error. This blame-the-victim concept provides little opportunity for effective accident prevention. Behavior modification does not focus on the fundamental safety problems that we face in the continuous process industry. For example, it does not address the need to change the dangerous contractor system or the unsafe practice of running plants far beyond their safe design limits, (p. 2)... 

Glove Guard s glove clips are now offered in a version that is molded entirely out of a metal detectable plastic that was designed specifically for use in the food processing industry to safely keep your gloves close at hand. 

In process industry plants, the concept of more inherently safe design is a recurring theme in the three reports of the Advisory Committee on Major Hazards (ACMH - set up in the UK after the Flixborough accident). These reports set the general principles of new process industry safety in the UK and they represent in their field what, for example, the IAEA Safety Fundamentals documents do in the nuclear industry. 

Concerning the operability concept in the previous list of principles of more inherently safe design in the process industry, it seems worth noting that, in the parallel field of nuclear plants, designers tend now to provide a longer grace period in case of mistakes or accidents (e.g. an increase of the water inventory in water reactors, and so on). 

A set of equipment intended to reduce the risk due to a specific hazard (a safety loop). Its purpose is to (1) automatically take an industrial process to a safe state when specified conditions are violated (2) permit a process to move forward in a safe manner when specified conditions allow (permissive functions) (3) take action to mitigate the consequences of an industrial hazard. It includes elements that detect when an incident is imminent, decide to take action, and then carry out the action needed to bring the process to a safe state. Its ability to detect, decide, and act is designated by the safety integrity level (SIL) of the function. See also Safety Integrity Level (SIL). 

Technical high-precision EOS are a remarkable compromise between keeping the accuracy and gain in simplicity. They can also be applied to substances where less extensive and less accurate experimental data are available. Furthermore, these equations should enable the user to extrapolate safely to the extreme conditions often encountered in industrial processes. For example, in the LDPE process ethylene is compressed to approx. 3000 bar, and it is necessary for the simulation of the process and the design of the equipment to have a reliable tool for the determination of the thermal and caloric properties. 

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