Wide-area assessments

Herbert Nelson, Ph.D. developed a new magnetometer system for the Naval Research Laboratory and completed a wide area assessment of an impact area finding hundreds of potential UXO targets, validating the author s proposition that the site near the District of Columbia s drinking water reservoir was an impact area. 

CEA has conducted a wide-ranging assessment of the sulphur-iodine cycle for massive hydrogen production. In particular, the hydrogen production cost was estimated, and found to be higher than what was anticipated. Although uncertainties do remain and areas for process improvements have been identified, the sulphur-iodine cycle competitiveness appears to require breakthroughs in efficiency increase and investment cost reduction. 

A Ranking Approach to Multiple Stressor, Wide-Area Ecological Risk Assessment... 

The subject of hazardous properties of chemical compounds constitutes a very wide area which includes topics of wide diversity ranging from toxicology and explosivity of a compound to its disposal or exposure limits in air. In fact, each of these topics can form a subject for a book on its own merits. There are several well-docnmented books on these topics. However, most of these works show important limitations. The objectives of this book, therefore, are (1) to present information on many aspects of hazardous properties of chemical substances, covering the research literature up to 1991, and (2) to correlate the hazardous properties of compounds to the functional groups, reactive sites, and other structural features in the molecules and thus to predict or assess the hazards of a compound from its structure when there is lack of experimental data. 

A wide-ranging assessment of potential applications of micro-structured reactors by Loewe and Hessel (2006) indicates other areas where PI could be applied, including the following, some of which are categorised as fine, rather than bulk, chemicals ... 

Physical and chemical characterization methods are essential to assess aspects such as material and processing quality. Chemical microanalysis - Raman microprobe coupled to an optical microscope and x-ray spectrometers in electronic microscopes - is applied to determine the elemental composition of a small region or it can be used to show the distribution of a particular element in a wide area of the specimen. 

The other main application area for predictive error analysis is in chemical process quantitative risk assessment (CPQRA) as a means of identifying human errors with significant risk consequences. In most cases, the generation of error modes in CPQRA is a somewhat unsystematic process, since it only considers errors that involve the failure to perform some pre-specified function, usually in an emergency (e.g., responding to an alarm within a time interval). The fact that errors of commission can arise as a result of diagnostic failures, or that poor interface design or procedures can also induce errors is rarely considered as part of CPQRA. However, this may be due to the fact that HEA techniques are not widely known in the chemical industry. The application of error analysis in CPQRA will be discussed further in Chapter 5. 

The wide participation of countries In the WHO air monitoring project ensures that representative distributions of the levels of SO, and SPN are obtained for urban areas. In order to assess other pollutants In conjunction with the SO, and SPN data, additional Information on NOj, CO and Pb were obtained from national reports. 

Professor Martel s book addresses specifically some of the more technical eispects of the risk assessment process, mainly in the areas of hazard identification, and of the consequence/effect analysis elements, of the overall analysis whilst where appropriate setting these aspects in the wider context. The book brings together a substantial corpus of information, drawn from a number of sources, about the toxic, flammable and explosive properties and effect (ie harm) characteristics of a wide range of chemical substances likely to be found in industry eind in the laboratory, and also addresses a spectrum of dangerous reactions of, or between, such substances which may be encountered. This approach follows the classical methodology and procedures of hazard identification, analysing material properties eind... 

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