Industrial research industry Chemical process industries

Figure 4 The changing scope of safety research in chemical process industry, adapted...

A bold step by universities is needed if their chemical engineering departments are (1) to help the United States achieve the preeminent position of leadership in new technologies and (2) to keep the highly successful U.S. chemical processing industries at the forefront of world markets for established technologies. The universities should conduct a one-time expansion of their chemical engineering departments over the next 5 years, exercising a preference for new faculty capable of research at interdisciplinary frontiers. 

The committee encourages decision makers in the chemical processing industries to increase their commitment to research in their companies both to retain their world leadership in chemical technology and to deliver to American society... 

To obtain an answer to the research questions posed, pro-active safety indicators used in today s chemical process industry were analysed and the deviations upon which they are based were compared with deviations present in the accident trajectories of 70 recent accidents. By comparing these two sets of deviations, it was observed that although re-occurring deviations with no direct perceived safety related consequences were present in the majority of accident trajectories they were nevertheless not addressed by the commonly used pro-active safety indicators. These so-called indirect perceived safety related deviations may therefore be more important indications of a possible accident than was thought previously. 

The research described in this thesis deals with safety management in complex and high-risk organizations. Companies in the chemical process industry handling hazardous substances are chosen as the subject of study. In particular this thesis will focus on the current safety indication process, and how this safety indication process works and its shortfalls. An unreliable indication process, leads automatically to wrong reactions and measures to prevent possible accidents. Increased understanding of this process helps in providing a better basis from which effective measures to prevent accidents can be derived. 

Having set the fundamental definitions in the field of safety research, this Section discusses how the determination of safety indicators developed over time, and why it is still possible for accidents to happen in the chemical process industry. 

Based on the observed problems in the measurement of safety in the chemical process industry, as outlined in the previous Chapter, additional research into this area is needed to provide companies with better indicators of possible accidents. In this Chapter the research methodology used to gain a more complete understanding of this measurement problem , is presented. This Chapter starts by discussing the focus, type and methodology of the research process. Then the research strategy and methods will be discussed to present the design structure of the complete research. 

The main purpose of this research is to design a protocol which provides companies in the chemical process industry with a better understanding of possible indicators of an accident, to enable them to further enhance their Safety Management Systems (SMS). 

Other, often made distinction in types of research, are between exploration, description, explanation, and testing, van der Zwaan (Zwaan van der, 1990). Exploration is conducted when theoretical knowledge in literature lacks information on which variables are important. Description types of research aim at the relevance of the variables. Explanation types of research aim at identifying the causal links between variables and phenomena. Finally, testing types of research aim at proving the hypotheses derived from the causal links. The research project discussed in this thesis is mainly explorative in nature. The emphasis is to design concepts and a protocol, which increases the understanding of the problem of how and why accidents continue to occur in companies in the chemical process industry. In this way a contribution to the solution of the problem will be made and consequently this research can be typified as applied positivistic exploratory research. 

Chapter 1 provided a general research area, where the problem of measuring safety pro-actively was identified in literature and in practice. This was done by sketching a recent accident and discussing how safety was measured in the past and currently. Moreover, it highlighted that the pro-active measurement of safety is still a problem in the chemical process industry. The development of substantially more understanding of how to pro-actively indicate accidents in the chemical process industry, was finally derived as the scope of this study and will be discussed in the remaining Chapters of this thesis. 

In Chapter 5 the conceptual approach from the previous Chapter will be tested and evaluated and finally applied to a single case study in the Dutch chemical process industry. This exercise is performed to test the conceptual approach in practice. The findings of the case study will be evaluated and will lead to refinements in the conceptual approach. Finally a structured protocol will be derived and applied to the same case study to ascertain if the structured protocol is effective and suitable for practical use and leads to answering the research questions posed in Chapter 1. 

In Chapter 7 the derived structured protocol will be applied to multiple case studies in the Dutch chemical process industry. Three case studies will be conducted to derive the answers on the posed research questions and to confirm or reject the results from the case histories in the previous Chapter. The case studies will be carefully selected so that the outcomes of the analysis are predictable for all three cases. This replication strengthens the generalization and overall validation of all case studies and the research in general. 

Only the accidents rated with 5 stars (most complete information) are used for this research. In total 260 accidents were shown as 5-star accidents. From these 260 accidents, 91 occurred between 1995 and 2002. In these 91 accidents, 21 accidents involved transport by road, water, rail, or air. As those accidents did not impact on the chemical process industry they were excluded from the analysis. The 70 remaining accidents were distributed all over the world as can be seen from Figure 12. Please note that this figure does not represent the geographical distribution of all accidents in the world, it merely represents a sub selection of FACTS accidents. 

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