A distributed fibre optic approach for providing early warning of Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI)

A novel fully distributed fibre optic humidity sensor technology suitable for spatially continuous monitoring of water ingress under pipeline insulation is reported. Results from controlled water ingress tests are presented, where the fibre cables were mounted on pipes insulated with air gap cell glass and aerogel insulation. The experiments revealed that the fibre optic sensor responded to water ingress equivalent to <10 ml/metre pipe, under air gap cell glass insulation. The fibre optic measurements were validated by comparison with conventional calibrated point humidity sensors. A compensation methodology using a reference optical fibre was used to effectively reduce the effect of temperature variations on the measurements. The ability of the sensor to monitor the spatial evolution of water ingress with cm scale resolution was demonstrated, as was the feasibility to make accurate water ingress measurement over 2 km fibre lengths. The technology could be used to assist targeted inspection campaigns aimed at minimizing the risk of Corrosion Under Insulation (CUI).     

Impact analysis of multi-sensor layout on the source term estimation of hazardous gas leakage

In chemical industry, sensors are used to monitor the leakage and emission of hazardous materials that are used for hazard warning and risk assessment to ensure safety production. The traditional sensor layout designs the scheme at single-layer, and thus causes large deviations in the estimated height and accuracy of source term estimation (STE). In this study, a dual-layer layout scheme for sensors is proposed. The numerical experiments verify that the improved schemes with an equal number of sensors, as well as detection errors, are beneficial to the accuracy of the STE results. The influence of the heights of the sensors and leak source on the results of STE is studied. Results show that the dual-layer sensor scheme with adjacent intervals at high places in the potential search space is highly favorable to locate the leak, and the scheme arranged near the ground is conducive for improving the estimation accuracy of source intensity. This study also compares the STE results of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulated scenarios under different sensor schemes and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed dual-layer sensor deployment scheme with adjacent intervals under turbulence condition.     

Operational risk assessment: A case of the Bhopal disaster

Accidental releases of hazardous chemicals from process facilities can cause catastrophic consequences. The Bhopal disaster resulting from a combination of inherently unsafe designs and poorly managed operations is a well-known case. Effective risk modeling approaches that provide early warnings are helpful to prevent and control such rare but catastrophic events. Probability estimation of these events is a constant challenge due to the scarcity of directly relevant data. Therefore, precursor-based methods that adopt the Bayesian theorem to update prior judgments on event probabilities using empirical data have been proposed. The updated probabilities are then integrated with consequences of varying severity to produce the risk profile.This paper proposes an operational risk assessment framework, in which a precursor-based Bayesian network approach is used for probability estimation, and loss functions are applied for consequence assessment. The estimated risk profile can be updated continuously given real-time operational data. As process facilities operate, this method integrates a failure-updating mechanism with potential consequences to generate a real-time operational risk profile. The real time risk profile is valuable in activating accident prevention and control strategies. The approach is applied to the Bhopal accident to demonstrate its applicability and effectiveness.     

一种能判断变频器状态的曳引设备节能系统

能量回馈式系统是变频曳引电梯广泛使用的一种节能系统,如何通过正确判断变频器状态来判断电梯处于电动状态还是发电状态,对能量回馈式节能系统的自动运行工作十分重要。因此设计一种能判断变频器实时工作状态的节能系统,利用在曳引设备变频器输出端任一回路中接入电流传感器,检测其是否有电流以判定变频器的运行状态。测试结果表明：该系统每月的用电量比原系统减少了38％以上,实现了变频曳引设备系统准确判断变频器运行状态并自动完成势能回收及反馈供电的节能控制。     

基于压电传感板的建筑疏散照明技术

在当今世界,电力、能源和安全是人们日常生活的基本要求。为了应对日益增长的能源需求,最终的解决办法是实施可再生能源,然后将其用于人类的安全。可再生能源需要以它们各自正确的方式实施。研究基于压电传感器片的迈步发电装置,并演示了如何利用这些能量实现建筑物疏散照明。我们在传感器的下方和顶部分别固定了木板和可移动网螺栓,利用压电传感器系统,行人可以通过迈步向发电装置施加电能,另外,将硅凝胶粘贴在位于下部木板空洞中的所有传感器顶部。当有人踩到板上时,就会自动施加压力。在木板的顶部和底部设置了一个孔,以便随时调整在底部和顶板之间安装的可移动网螺栓。烟雾传感器用于启动灯光。使用这种设备,我们实现了建筑物疏散路径上的LED灯正常运行。结果表明,这种安全发电的设计和方法具有一定的实用价值,同时也满足了全球对能源的需求。     

基于无线传感器网络的市政下水道可燃气体监测系统设计及应用

为防止下水道可燃气体积聚引发爆炸事故,利用无线传感器网络技术设计了市政下水道可燃气体监测系统.实测结果表明:气体传感器监测数据相对误差在2.0%以内,无线数据收发设备的年发送成功率达到98.0%,满足工程运用需求,系统具有较高的可靠性和稳定性.结合无线网络覆盖范围广、实时在线的特点,该系统实现了对不同区域下水道内可燃气体浓度的远程监测,为下水道的安全预警提供了有效依据.     

Blast phenomena in urban tunnel systems

Traffic infrastructure in urbanised areas is increasingly projected in tunnels underground or covered over, these days. A consequence is that in case of an incident with hazardous materials the safety level for fellow road users in tunnels is considerably less than it is in surface infrastructure. To reduce the consequences of incidents for fellow tunnel users, urban tunnels are sometimes interrupted by open spaces of limited length. Open spaces allow, for instance, the release of smoke in case of a fire. In this way, possible lethal effects are limited to the tunnel section in which the incident occurred. To what extent an open space may also be effective in the mitigation of blast effects from an explosion in a tunnel system is subject of this paper.

To this end, the blast effects originating from the rupture of a 50 m³ LPG pressure vessel in an urban tunnel system have been computed by numerical simulation. The results show that an open space in a tunnel system has a significant mitigating effect on the blast effects indeed. However, as a consequence of the ingress of a high-velocity jet flow that follows on a primary blast wave, a second blast wave develops in the tunnel section following on an open space. The strength of this second blast wave is not very dependent on the length of the open space. It shows that an open space in a tunnel system may not always limit the lethal effects of explosion incidents in tunnels to the tube in which the incident occurred. The second blast wave in the tunnel section following on an open space may have lethal consequences for fellow tunnel users by car window failure.     

Finger and hand protection on circular table and panel saws

Several hundred accidents involving the use of circular saws and resulting in injury, to hands or fingers occur each year in Germany.In the presented project, new approaches for the prevention of hand injuries and for the contactless detection of fingers are being investigated for comprehensive protection on circular saws. The basic principles can be applied to other machines with manual loading and/or unloading. This paper describes several principles to distinct human skin and wood and a safety guard that prevents touching the rotating blade. In a first approach a reliable protective device with functional diversity has been developed using a passive infrared sensor in combination with a capacitive field sensor. Second the distinction between skin and wood or other material is done by dedicated kind of spectral analysis in the near infrared region. With a kind of light curtain the intrusion into the dangerous zone near the blade can be prevented.The safety guard protects the operator’s hand within 50 ms. The forces of the protective system peak at no more than 120 N. We are presenting a complete strategy for such different tasks as cutting wedges, stopped cutting and hidden cutting, which have a very high odds ratio.     

Safety climate: Leading or lagging indicator of safety outcomes?

This paper theorizes how and why safety climate can be conceived as both a leading and a lagging indicator of safety events (i.e., accidents, injuries). When safety climate is conceived as a leading indicator, a prospective design is utilized and safety climate data are correlated with accidents/injuries that occur in the future. When safety climate is conceived as a lagging indicator, retrospective designs are used in which safety climate data are correlated with prior accidents/injuries. We examine the research literature to reveal that safety climate has been investigated as both a leading and a lagging indicator, but it is usually only examined as one or the other within a given study and has been examined as a lagging indicator most frequently. Consistent with our theorizing, prospective designs yield stronger relationships than retrospective designs, suggesting that safety climate is a better leading indicator than lagging indicator; however, it is clearly both. Implications for safety climate research and study design are discussed.     

法布里-珀罗光纤传感器在桥梁健康监测中的应用

对桥梁实施监测 ,是诊断桥梁健康状况的主要手段 ,现代传感技术和计算机技术的发展 ,使桥梁健康状态的实时监测变为可能。笔者分析了法布里 -珀罗光纤传感器的基本原理和特性 ,设计了一种法布里 -珀罗应变测试系统 ,并在预应力混凝土连续桥梁上与电阻式应变传感器进行了应变对比测试试验。试验结果表明 ,法布里 -珀罗光纤传感器对环境温度不敏感 ,易与钢筋、混凝土复合 ,适用于桥梁结构的应变测试 ,可用于桥梁健康状态的在线监测     

Designing sensor systems capable of differentiating children from adults

INTRODUCTION: Injury prevention systems intended to prevent children from entering hazardous locations (or at least alert caregivers if that occurs) often respond to every instance of a person's presence, regardless of whether the intruder is a child. This performance results in a high nuisance alarm rate that sometimes causes adults to disable or circumvent the safety system. If a child safety system can accurately identify intruders as adults or children, nuisance alarm rates can be decreased. METHOD: This analysis selects three human factors (height, foot length, and cognition) amenable to adult/child differentiation and describes likely sensor strategies, advantages, and disadvantages. RESULTS: Preliminary testing of prototypes systems shows that simple sensor systems are capable of acquiring adequate data for adult/child differentiation. The discussion addresses requirements for discriminator systems and the effects of various sensor combinations on overall performance.     

Influence of thermal shock of piezoelectric pressure sensors on the measurement of explosion pressures

Piezoelectric pressure sensors are susceptible to changing temperatures, because resulting mechanical deformations of the sensor membrane and housing may exert a positive or negative force on the piezo crystal, thus changing the reading of this sensor. The consideration and compensation of this influence quantity is a frequent topic of many investigations in the field of combustion chambers, of spark-ignition engines and internal combustion engines. However, this is not the case in the field of the type of protection “flameproof enclosures”. Here a peculiarity is the fast temperature rise during a single explosion and the concurrent influence of the temperature gradient, which is often described as thermal shock. The whole event has a typical duration time of the order of seconds and less. Thermal shocks have so far received little attention, as was also a lesson learnt from the evaluation of an interlaboratory comparison between Ex testing laboratories. The laboratories handle thermal shock in a variety of ways, starting from complete ignorance up to various sophisticated coatings. This was a main source of different results within the field of participants. This work evaluates the behavior of different piezoelectric pressure sensor types with respect to thermal shock. Different temperature protection measures are investigated regarding their functionality, practicability and stability. Possible influences on the sensitivity of the sensors due to the used protective measures regarding thermal shock are shown. The transient temperature load of the sensor membrane is estimated by physical calculations as well as numerical analysis based on surface temperature measurements transformed in a surface heat flux density. This work provides guidelines for typical end-users in the field of flameproof enclosures how to handle thermal shock correctly.     

一种改进的帧差法实现火焰目标分割

针对传统船舶火灾报警系统采用的传感器在远离火灾源时很难探测到初期火灾的特性,提出了利用摄像头模式识别的方法来探测火源的构想,将顶置鱼眼摄像头作为图像传感器,在一个较大的范围内探测初期火灾,提出了一种基于火焰闪点位置的交叉性与聚合性的帧差算法,实现火焰目标分割识别.该方法是在实时视频流中,对连续两帧图像进行帧差,根据闪点位置的交叉性排除运动物体的干扰,再根据闪点的聚合程度排除一部分游离的干扰闪点,最后得到疑似火焰区域.对疑似火焰区域二值化、抽取轮廓、再由种子点位置确定火焰外形.此法能够高效地从视频图像中分割出火焰,从而为火灾的初期预防报警提供高效识别手段.     

Experimental research on race and sex discrimination: The record and the prospects

Research in industry regarding race and sex access discrimination is reviewed. Review of sex discrimination research suggests that negative access discrimination exists for female applicants when the position is male-stereotyped and positive access discrimination exists when it is female-stereotyped. Results on race discrimination are few in number with mixed results, some showing reverse discrimination and others showing discrimination against blacks. More complex studies examining interactions between race and sex also provide mixed results. Recent evidence, which suggests that selection decisions are much more complex than have been studied, may account for the conflicting findings. Future research with more imaginative and complex designs and larger sample sizes is needed. Research designs should be selected to facilitate better measurement of the effects of civil rights law enforcement.     

Measuring the effectiveness of an industrial lift truck safety training program

A behavior (work) sampling approach was used to both develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an occupational safety training program for industrial lift truck operators. Two studies, each using different experimental designs and performed at two separate warehouses, were conducted, resulting in a total of 96 operators trained. Observations through several months of training program assessment indicated that: (a) occupational safety training, emphasizing modification of operationally defined unsafe work practices derived from task/hazard analysis, can be demonstrated to be effective and to endure beyond cessation of performance feedback; (b) the basis for endurance appears to be continued practice in the modified safe work procedures, coupled with a redefinition of group norms sustained through informal influences such as peer modeling of desired behaviors and continued management support of the program; and (c) a behavior sampling procedure, specifying performancebased criteria, can be used effectively in both the development and evaluation of an occupational-safety training program.     

An application of a conditional logistic regression to study the effects of safety belts, principal impact points, and car weights on drivers' fatalities

In addition to experimental trials in automotive factories, there is a fundamental need to monitor real people involved in real motor vehicle collisions to determine the impact of automotive design characteristics on injury mortality. To aid in designing future safety features for drivers' seats, data from the Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) were used to assess the effects of safety belts, directions of crash impacts, age, sex, and car weights on motor vehicle injury fatalities. Furthermore, because the FARS includes only accidents in which there was at least one fatality, this paper introduces a multivariate approach — a logistic regression conditioned on each accident —to avoid the sampling biases inherent in the FARS. The resulting model is used to quantify the relations among the safety belts, the directions of crash impacts, and vehicle weights and their effects on fatalities. Recause the proposed approach allows researchers to study many important variables simultaneously and eliminates the biases resulting from many possible confounders, the estimates presented in this paper are considered to be more precise and more firmly established than earlier estimates. The new approach to analyzing the FARS data will also be useful for investigating the effects of other risk factors or automotive characteristics on crash fatalities.     

Maintaining the corporate memory

A well known fact is that corporations don’t have memories. This is because the majority of the knowledge is maintained in the employees’ heads and when they leave that knowledge walks out with them. This continues to be the bane of process safety as errors get perpetuated and incidents repeated. A system can be created, though, to form and keep a corporate memory by accumulating the knowledge as it is developed and saving it in an organized manner, to be easily found and used by others as needed. In a previous paper we saw how knowledge can be organized. In this paper we will show that knowledge is best shared by example (for instance, we would like to design our plant based on the best applicable designs available), and how it can be continually collected with little effort once a proper workflow has been adopted. In this workflow the knowledge is reviewed and indexed as part of the collection process and organized into the niches of a previously created framework. The resulting knowledge infrastructure serves as the corporate memory and besides being a boon to process safety, it becomes an efficiency machine (no more need to reinvent the wheel!).     

Compression system check-valve failure hazards

Processes that utilize multistage compression systems (olefins plant compression systems, gas processing, integrated refrigeration systems, etc.) have the potential for overpressure due to single or multiple check-valve failure. Catastrophic equipment failure resulting from overpressure can potentially occur due to compression system discharge, interstage, and/or suction check-valve failure, coincident with compressor shutdown. Depending on system design and application, overpressure values approaching or exceeding 300% of equipment design are possible, while for some equipment, even limited overpressure can result in catastrophic vessel failure due to brittle fracture. Additional hazards associated with compression system fail-to-check scenarios include risks associated with excessive flare loading and compressor rotor reverse rotation. In the case of an ethylene refrigeration compressor at a typical ethylene plant, rotor reverse rotation can potentially exceed overspeed limits.This paper provides risk assessment results based on analyses performed on the three primary compression systems in six ethylene plants. The methodologies used for risk identification screening, detailed risk assessment and evaluation of system dynamics are all presented. Alternative methods for mitigating risks are also discussed, along with check-valve reliability data. An overview of applicable overpressure protection requirements defined in the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is provided. This paper will be of interest to anyone who designs or operates multistage compression systems in the chemical, petrochemical or refining industries.     

基于BP神经网络的机车车辆智能火灾防控系统设计

设计了一种分布式模块化机车车辆智能火灾防控系统,该系统由车载主处理器、多个车载现场处理器、多个传感器和多个执行器构成,各控制单元可根据各种机车车辆车型灵活配置。车载主处理器通过BP人工神经网络算法实现对火警的智能识别,可根据环境因素调节火警判断时的相关参数,适用性强,有效提高火灾防控的准确性,进而更好地保障机车车辆的运行安全。     

Quantitative sensitivity and reliability analysis of sensor networks for well kick detection based on dynamic Bayesian networks and Markov chain

Kick is considered as an early warning sign to the blowout that is among the most undesired and feared accidents during drilling operations. Kick detection system is commonly used to timely identify the occurrence of a kick. The method commonly used for kick detection relies on the proper selection of monitoring indicators. A kick detection system should not only have very high accuracy but also maintain reliable over a long time. Different from the existing studies focusing on improving the detection accuracy, this paper presents a frame emphasizing on quantitatively analyzing and enhancing the reliability of the kick detection sensor networks. The dynamic Bayesian network (DBN) for the sensor networks is established that employs Markov chain to obtain the reliability degradation of measurement sensors over time. The proposed method is applied and evaluated by case studies to conduct reliability and sensitivity analysis for kick detection sensor networks. The reliability analysis results demonstrate that the proposed method can quantitatively analyze the reliability of a kick detection sensor networks consisting of various sensors over given time periods. The sensitivity analysis results indicate that the proposed method is effective in identifying the critical sensors that have the greatest effect on the reliability of one certain kick detection system. Based on the analysis results, optimized logical combination of sensors of a kick detection system can be achieved. An improved sensor network for the unreliable case was proposed and evaluated.