Process Safety

The key to low injury and incident rates is creating a work environment that encourages employees to always take action to resolve potential problems. Here's how to do that.

In the safety culture of some companies, the first recognition of trouble may be a sudden and massive failure. Learn how to decipher the warning signals to avoid safety incidents. <BR><BR>

Check out warning devices for hazardous areas and high-visibility work vests that reduce static electricity.

Layer of protection analysis (LOPA) is a simplified process risk-assessment technique that uses order-of-magnitude estimates for initiating events, consequence severity, and likelihood of failure of independent protection layers (IPLs) to approximate the risk of a scenario. It is generally used after a process hazard analysis (PHA) team has identified a hazard scenario that requires further analysis to ensure the adequacy of the safeguards that exist or are being proposed.

Posing various possible incidents - rather than just the worst-case one - illuminates those that are really important and those that are most likely to occur

This simple classification scheme can be used to characterize the thermal instability risks posed by reactive chemicals in a process.