Safety minimizing problems

Although most process safety audits are quite short (typically just a few days) it is still important to prepare a formal schedule. Not only does a schedule minimize problems such as two auditors wishing to speak to the same person at the same time, it also is a courtesy to the host company. Most people are very busy, and they do not want to waste time waiting for an auditor to show up. 

Professionals working in the area of human factors have studied humans in regard to their expected behaviors. To minimize safety-related problems, knowledge of these expected or general human behaviors is considered essential. Some of the general or typical human behaviors are as follows [25,26] ... 

Measures to minimize safety problems must be initiated at the start of the life cycle of any product, but too often determinations of criticality are left to production or quality control personnel who may have an incomplete knowledge of which items are safety critical (Hammer, 1980). Any potential non-conformity that occurs with a severity sufficient to cause a product or service not to satisfy intended normal or reasonably foreseeable usage requirements is termed a defect (Kutz, 1986). The optimum defect level will vary according to the application, where the more severe the consequences of failure the higher the quality of conformance needs to be. 

The focus of this element is on the enhancement of product safety and the minimization of product liability through the use of standards, initial tests and evaluations, human factors considerations, and subsequent analyses of problems. For ESH/PSM, safety might be viewed more broadly as safety, health, and environmental protection. 

Process operation for clean process technology. Many of the problems associated with waste from process operations can be mitigated if the process is designed for low inventories of material in the process. This is also compatible with design for inherent safety. Other ways to minimize waste from process operation are7 ... 

Ionic liquids interact very efficiently with microwaves through the ionic conduction mechanism (see Section 2.2) and are rapidly heated at rates easily exceeding 10 °C s"1 without any significant pressure build-up [52]. Therefore, safety problems arising from over-pressurization of heated sealed reaction vessels are minimized. 

The exact cause of the contamination of the MIC is not known. If the accident was caused by a problem with the process, a well-executed safety review could have identified the problem. The scrubber and flare system should have been fully operational to prevent the release. Inventories of dangerous chemicals, particularly intermediates, should also have been minimized. 

Gupta/Maranas (2003) as one example for a demand uncertainty model present a demand and supply network planning model to minimize costs. Production decisions are made here and now and demand uncertainty is balanced with inventories independently incorporating penalties for safety stock and demand violations. Uncertain demand quantity is modeled as normally distributed random variables with mean and standard deviation. The philosophy to have one production plan separated from demand uncertainty can be transferred to the considered problem. Penalty costs for unsatisfied demand and normally distributed demand based on historical data... 

Although much useful information on ciguetera toxins has been generated, the presence of these toxins in some seafood remains a serious international health problem. Future research goals should include the development of practical tests for product safety, the development of specific antidotes for the toxins, the introduction of methods to minimize the accidental consumption of toxic seafood, the discovery of the genesis of the toxins and methods to control the problem, and the development and dissemination of an information base on all aspects of this and other seafood toxin problems for the seafood industry, health personnel, researchers, and the public. 

Scale-up from grams to 100 g and more may lead to unexpected problems. Safe operations are essential to minimize risk during scale-up with scale-up there is always increased liability from accidents, including injury to personnel, loss of equipment, delay of key deliveries, damage to a company s reputation, and more. Some companies require that safety hazard assessments be completed before any process is mn in a pilot plant others require safety hazard assessments before a process is scaled up to greater than a given threshold amount. Testing for such assessments may be conducted on... 

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