Safety,reliability and worker satisfaction during organizational change

The research presented in this paper was carried out in four process industry plants in the Netherlands, to identify factors that have the potential to increase safety and reliability while maintaining or improving job satisfaction. The data used were gathered as part of broader trajectories in these firms, aiming at the simultaneous improvement of productivity and safety, while maintaining or improving worker satisfaction. The results show that participative leadership is crucial for combining an increase in safety and reliability with job satisfaction. Participative leadership has a positive effect on job satisfaction and through proper maintenance also on the prevention and absence of disturbances and on the reliability of the production process. The results of this research show the importance of participative leadership for safety, reliability and worker satisfaction, especially during organizational change. Other important factors are operator competences, teamwork, proper handling of variance and disturbances, and proper maintenance. It also confirms that apart from technological factors associated with proper maintenance, people and team related factors are important for increasing safety and reliability in the process industry, especially for being prepared for disturbances and to be able to cope adequately with them.     

Continuous performance assessment and improvement of integrated HSE and maintenance systems by multivariate analysis in gas transmission units

In this study, an integrated “Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE)” and maintenance systems are presented. Multivariate analysis is used for continuous performance assessment and improvement of these systems. The two subjects of “Maintenance System” and “HSE” have been individually investigated several times in different studies. However, few studies have been done to integrate these two systems and provide an integrated system for their implementation. This study evaluates current maintenance and HSE systems of a Gas Transmission Unit by Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Moreover, decision making units (DMUs) are examined and ranked. Employees are considered as DMUs. This is done through investigating and measuring their efficiencies and identifying the inefficient and less-efficient units. Since an increase in the number of inputs does not lead to an increase in the number of outputs with the same scale, an output-oriented DEA with a Variable Returns to Scale (VRS) is used. The Fuzzy DEA (FDEA) is also used in this research to decrease uncertainty existing in qualitative indicators and human error. Finally, suggestions are given to improve those DMUs. The managers and employees of the gas transmission unit constitute the statistical population of the study. To achieve the objectives of this study, standard questionnaires with respect to HSE and Maintenance system are completed by operators. The proposed approach would help policy makers and top managers of Gas Transmission Company to have a more comprehensive and thorough understanding the working conditions with respect to the maintenance and HSE features.     

Uncertainties in a risk management context in early phases of offshore petroleum field development

The current risk management approach for the Norwegian offshore petroleum industry came into effect in 2001 and has been stable with minor changes for 15 years. Relatively few new installations were slated for development until quite recently, and several new projects have been started in the last few years. The paper considers the risk management approach in the pre-FEED phase and builds on two case studies selected from the most recent cases. These case studies have been evaluated with respect to how uncertainties are considered in the early phase, based on the submission of the Plan for Development and Operation, their evaluations by authorities and the supporting documents. Both case studies involve new concepts for which there is no experience from similar environments and/or water depths. In spite of what could have been expected, the case studies conclude that uncertainties have not been in focus at all during concept development. This appears to be definitely the case for the licensees, but also to be the case for the authorities. Some suggestions are presented for what could have been considered by the licensees and authorities.     

System safety principles: A multidisciplinary engineering perspective

System safety is of particular importance for many industries. Broadly speaking, it refers to the state or objective of striving to sustainably ensure accident prevention through actions on multiple safety levers (technical, organizational, and regulatory). While complementary to risk analysis, it is distinct in one important way: risk analysis is anticipatory rationality examining the possibility of adverse events (or accident scenarios), and the tools of risk analysis support and in some cases quantify various aspects of this analysis effort. The end-objective of risk analysis is to help identify and prioritize risks, inform risk management, and support risk communication. These tools however do not provide design or operational guidelines and principles for eliminating or mitigating risks. Such considerations fall within the purview of system safety.In this work, we propose a set of five safety principles, which are domain-independent, technologically agnostic, and broadly applicable across industries. While there is a proliferation of detailed safety measures (tactics) in specific areas and industries, a synthesis of high-level safety principles or strategies that are independent of any particular instantiation, and from which specific safety measures can be derived or related to, has pedagogical value and fulfills an important role in safety training and education. Such synthesis effort also supports creativity and technical ingenuity in the workforce for deriving specific safety measures, and for implementing these principles and handling specific local or new risks. Our set of safety principles includes: (1) the fail-safe principle; (2) the safety margins principle; (3) the un-graduated response principle (under which we subsume the traditional “inherently safe design” principle); (4) the defense-in-depth principle; and (5) the observability-in-depth principle. We carefully examine each principle and provide examples that illustrate their use and implementation. We relate these principles to the notions of hazard level, accident sequence, and conditional probabilities of further hazard escalation or advancement of an accident sequence. These principles are a useful addition to the intellectual toolkit of engineers, decision-makers, and anyone interested in safety issues, and they provide helpful guidelines during system design and risk management efforts.     

Corrosion behavior of steels for CO2 injection

The process chain for Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) includes tubing for injection of CO₂ into saline aquifers. The compressed CO₂ is likely to contain specific impurities; small concentrations of SO₂ and NO₂ in combination with oxygen and humidity are most harmful. In addition, CO₂ saturated brine is supposed to rise in the well when the injection process is interrupted. The material selection has to ensure that neither CO₂ nor brine or a combination of both will leak out of the inner tubing. In this comprehensive paper the investigated materials range from low-alloy steels and 13% Cr steels up to high-alloy materials. Electrochemical tests as well as long term exposure tests were performed in CO₂, in brine and combination of both; pressure was up to 100 bar, temperature up to 60 °C. Whereas the CO₂ stream itself can be handled using low alloy steels, combinations of CO₂ and brine require more resistant materials to control the strong tendency to pitting corrosion. The corrosion behavior of heat-treated steels depends on factors such as microstructure and carbon content. For different sections of the injection tube, appropriate materials should be used to guarantee safety and consider cost effectiveness.     

由一起厂内机动车事故引发的思考

本文对一起叉车安全事故的直接原因进行分析,并分别讨论了叉车本身缺陷导致事故发生的可能性、驾驶人员自身的不规范操作,以及使用单位在制度建设及实施方面存在的缺陷.     

Analysis of underlying causes of investigated loss of containment incidents in Dutch Seveso plants using the Storybuilder method

In the Netherlands there are around 400 “Seveso” sites that fall under the Dutch Major Hazards Decree (BRZO) 1999. Between 2006 and 2010 the Dutch Labour Inspectorate's Directorate for Major Hazard Control completed investigations of 118 loss of containment incidents involving hazardous substances from this group. On the basis of investigation reports the incidents were entered in a tailor-made tool called Storybuilder developed for the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment for identifying the dominant patterns of technical safety barrier failures, barrier task failures and underlying management causes associated with the resulting loss of control events. The model is a bow-tie structure with six lines of defence, three on either side of the central loss of containment event. In the first line of defence, failures in the safety barriers leading to loss of control events were primarily equipment condition failures, pre start-up and safeguarding failures and process deviations such as pressure and flow failures. These deviations, which should have been recovered while still within the safe envelope of operation, were missed primarily because of inadequate indication signals that the deviations have occurred. Through failures of subsequent lines of defence they are developing into serious incidents. Overall, task failures are principally failures to provide adequate technical safety barriers and failures to operate provided barriers appropriately. Underlying management delivery failures were mainly found in equipment specifications and provisions, procedures and competence. The competence delivery system is especially important for identifying equipment condition, equipment isolation for maintenance, pre-start-up status and process deviations. Human errors associated with operating barriers were identified in fifty per cent of cases, were mostly mistakes and feature primarily in failure to prevent deviations and subsequently recover them. Loss of control associated with loss of containment was primarily due to the containment being bypassed (72% of incidents) and less to material strength failures (28%). Transfer pipework, connections in process plant and relief valves are the most frequent release points and the dominant release material is extremely flammable. It is concluded that the analysis of a large number of incidents in Storybuilder can support the quantification of underlying causes and provide evidence of where the weak points exist in major hazard control in the prevention of major accidents.     

Quantitative assessment in safety reports of the consequences from the detonation of solid explosives

Safety reports are mandatory documents in member states of European Union whenever any threshold limits of amounts of either stored or processed hazardous substances are exceeded. After a short introduction to EU Seveso Directives on major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances and to the transposition and implementation by member states, with a brief comment on last 2012/18/EU Directive (also known as Seveso III directive), the paper focuses on drafting of safety reports for industrial activities involving solid explosives. Specifically, the quantitative assessment of consequences from detonation is tackled respect to the side-on overpressure and the debris production. Both direct and inverse problems are illustrated to determine respectively the overpressure value at a given distance, and the explosive amount that allows respecting the regulations. Their solution is based on either analytic or numerical techniques and being based on recent scientific publications on the matter either evaluates or zeroes nonlinear algebraic equations. The availability of these equations avoids grounding the consequences assessment on diagrams and nomograms that otherwise would lead to interpretation and usage errors besides avoiding the automatic solution of the inverse problem. The paper focuses also on details such as embankment, crater, munitions, rocket propellant, building structure, and wall material that, at different levels, play a role in the assessment of detonation consequences. A discussion on debris formation, the available literature, and the evaluation of the impact probability of fragments on both fixed and moving targets closes the paper.     

A new approach for layout optimization in maintenance workshops with safety factors: The case of a gas transmission unit

In this study, an Integrated Simulation-Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach is presented for optimum facility layout of maintenance workshop in a gas transmission unit. The process of repair of incoming parts includes various operations on different facilities. The layout problem in this system involves determining the optimum location of all maintenance shop facilities. Layout optimization plays a crucial role in this type of problems in terms of increasing the efficiency of main production line. Standard types of layouts including U, S, W, Z and straight lines are considered. First, the maintenance workshop is modeled with discrete-event-simulation. Time in system, average waiting time, average machine utilization, average availability of facilities, average queue length of facilities (AL) and average operator utilization are obtained from simulation as key performance indicators (KPIs) of DEA. Also, safety index and number of operators are considered as other KPIs. Finally, a unified non-radial Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is presented with respect to the stated KPIs to rank all layouts alternatives and to identify the best configuration. Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is used to validate and verify the results. Previous studies do not consider safety factor in layout design problems. This is the first study that presents an integrated approach for identification of optimum layout in a maintenance workshop of gas transmission unit by incorporating safety and conventional factors.     

快开门式压力容器安全管理现状及建议

快开门式压力容器是一种广泛应用于建材、纺织、橡胶、医药、食品、玻璃等行业的固定式压力容器,因其结构的特殊性,对安全联锁保护装置和作业人员操作及应急处置能力要求较高,一旦安全联锁装置失效或作业人员应急处置不当,极易发生安全事故。本文针对快开门式压力容器安全管理的法律法规要求、几种典型快开门式压力容器现状及存在问题,从设计、制造、检验、监管等环节提出快开门式压力容器安全管理措施及建议,以确保其安全运行。