xx - mary kay o'connor process safety...

Centerline, Vol. 21, No. 3 Fall 2017

Vol. 21 No. 3

FALL 2017

2. Director’s Corner

4. WCCE-10

5. Student News

6. Faculty Fellow Research

8. Research

10. Recent Publications

12. Symposium

14. Lamiya Zahin

Scholarship Essay

16. Symposium Summaries

35. Outreach Activities

36. 2018 International

Symposium Call for

Papers

37. Instrumentation and

Automation Symposium

38. Continuing Education

41. Calendar of Events

The Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center XX 20th Annual International

Symposium “Beyond Regulatory Compliance, Making Safety Second Nature” in Association with IChemE, held on October 24-26 drew over 620 participants from industry, government, and academia.

Ms. Lynne Lachenmyer, Vice President of Exxon Mobil Corporation, presented the Frank P. Lees Memorial Lecture “Our Continuing Journey to Process Safety Excellence.”

Mr. Hector Rivero, President and CEO of the Texas Chemical Council, presented the keynote address entitled “US Chemical Industry: Continuous Improvement in Environmental Stewardship and Process Safety Management” on the second day. In addition, he participated in the Hurricane Harvey Panel with Valerio Cozzani and Hans

Pasman, led by Dr. Sam Mannan.

On the final day of the symposium, Mr. Jim Blackburn, environmental lawyer at Blackburn and Carter, and professor of practice at Rice University gave the keynote. His talk was titled “Creative Solutions: Citizens, Climate, and the Future.”

In these two and a half days, nearly 100 presentations were given on various safety-related

topics, including safety culture/operational discipline, risk analysis, process management for safety, and inherent safety. We were excited to have a variety of companies showcase their new technology and safety knowledge.

Special thanks also to our sponsors: Formosa Plastics Group, GexCon US, and Siemens Process Safety Consulting.

XX

20th Anniversary of the International Symposium

Continued on page 12

2 Centerline, Vol. 21, No. 3 Fall 2017

Director’s Corner Hurricane Harvey, a category 3 storm ravaged the greater Houston area and other cities along the U.S. gulf coast. According to some reports, the storm was responsible for a 500-year flood, which caused very high water levels rising very rapidly in many areas. The storm itself was the direct cause of more than 60 fatalities, many more injuries, and untold other human sufferings. Reports have categorized this storm and its outcome as the costliest one in U.S. history with damage and rebuilding estimates being higher than 100 billion dollars.

The storm also battered the chemical and oil and gas industry very extensively. The approaching storm and the storm itself caused the whole industry all along the gulf coast to come to a grinding halt, shutdown and stoppage of production. Chemical plants are designed to withstand all kinds of scenarios including hurricane-force winds and floods; however, the severity of Harvey (characterized by some as a 500-year event) has thrust the industry into uncharted territory. The combination of Harvey’s path, duration and rainfall total has led to several hazardous materials incidents (including the Arkema incident in Crosby, Texas). Needless to say, the storm and the associated shutdowns have also caused havoc with the supply side of the U.S. chemicals industry on an unprecedented scale. The extent of process safety consequences in different plants includes minor upsets, extensive flaring, unplanned releases of chemicals to avoid other undesirable outcomes, and the Arkema incident. While the damage caused by Harvey and the ensuing chemical plant incidents are and should be a cause for concern, we should look at things in the right perspective. Given the severity and rare probability of Harvey, if the totality of consequences we end up dealing with from industry events are limited to what we have seen so far, I would say that investments made in the process safety programs served their purpose.

Regardless of the perspectives (ranging from trivial to dire) regarding the consequences from the Harvey-related incidents, it must be recognized that we are not out of the woods yet. A lot of work needs to be done to assess any potential damage to the equipment, tankage, and other process facilities by the storm and the flood. Startup and shutdown under normal circumstances are transitional processes with inherent dangers and the potential for undesirable outcomes and incidents is relatively higher compared to steady-state operations. Thus, startups of all the gulf coast plants following the receding impact of Harvey is at best going to be a challenging task and at worst could result in potential incidents because of compromised and damaged equipment.

For the Arkema event, the consequences range from the fume/flame exposure that we saw for some of the emergency responders to explosions (most likely not as large as West, and most likely the impacts would have been contained within the 1.5 mile radius). There could also be some toxic releases that may have some health effects, but again we have to assume that the 1.5 mile radius was chosen with some basis that the dispersion will bring the concentration below dangerous levels.

Effective safety programs are usually designed with what might be referred to as the PMR concept. PMR refers to a hierarchical approach consisting of prevention, mitigation, and response systems. It is apparent why a hierarchical approach is used because, if at all possible, the first option is to prevent the undesirable outcome from occurring. If prevention does not work to the fullest extent, then the mitigation systems are available to reduce the impact zone. Finally, the response mechanisms are set up to reduce the consequences, terminate the event, and save people and property. Clearly some parts of the prevention and mitigation programs did not work in Arkema, only time will tell after detailed investigation reports are available with regard to what systems Arkema had in place with regard to prevention and mitigation and how well they worked. However, things worked much better with regard to the response and in general, I think the actions taken were appropriate. There seemed to be a high degree of coordination between Arkema, local response agencies, and other governmental agencies. When Arkema determined that they were not able to maintain refrigeration for the organic peroxides, they pretty much knew that it was only a matter of time that the material would progress into a runaway reaction and fires and explosions were likely. Thus, the decision to evacuate and maintain an exclusion zone was the appropriate action to take under the circumstances. I have to believe, without direct knowledge currently, that the 1.5 mile radius exclusion zone was determined on the basis of some explosion and dispersion calculations. In such situations, it is prudent to pick exclusion distances on a conservative basis.

In addition to the Arkema site, there are many other high hazard sites in the Greater Houston area that were impacted by hurricane Harvey and the ensuing floods. While there were other sporadic incidents and spills in a few other facilities, none caused as much concern as the Arkema facility. While the immediate emergency related to


M. Sam Mannan

Fall 2017

Harvey is behind us now, the whole petrochemical industry in the gulf coast is still dealing with the aftermath. Refineries are bouncing back from Harvey, which caused about 25% of U.S. refining capacity to shut down. Other chemical complexes are also assessing their facilities and undertaking the painstaking process of restarting. Getting these production facilities back on-line is a very complex problem. In addition to making sure that all employees are available and not personally impacted by Harvey, there is a need for a large number of additional specialized manpower to inspect the facilities and then startup. Startups require special procedures and represent proportionally larger number of incidents under normal circumstances. In the post-Harvey startups, additional care and inspections are needed to make sure that equipment or storage that may have been compromised by Harvey does not result in undesirable outcomes.

Arkema should have expected flooding as a scenario and loss of all power and refrigeration capability. However, some may say that it is not realistic for company officials to foresee such extreme flooding and such rapid increase of water levels. It would be revealing to find out if this facility has approached this point of flooding in the past. The dangers of the chemicals they produce should have prompted them to plan for the worst. They knew they were dealing with an unstable chemical that they needed to keep refrigerated. It must have been a tough decision to have to abandon the site knowing that refrigeration had failed for these unstable materials and there was potential for explosions and fires with ensuing consequences. They most likely needed another layer of protection for this extreme scenario. The smoke and combustion products (regardless of their hazard potential) will be perceived by many in the surrounding neighborhood to be harmful. We hope that the investigation launched by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board results in a thorough, objective and credible report that answers some of these questions and provides lessons learned. The lessons learned should then be captured into the design and operations of the process facilities. Finally, while it is essential to discuss the sequence of events in the Arkema incident, it is even more important that we have a dialogue about what worked well and what did not work so that we can improve prevention, mitigation, response and recovery measures industry-wide. These lessons learned should be implemented as soon as possible because extreme weather events are becoming more and more common, and as such we must be prepared to deal with natural disasters triggering technological failures.

Also, the experience with Harvey as well as the experiences with West and Tianjin have taught us that it is very important to have knowledge about the hazardous materials that are present in our communities. Not only that, we also should be comfortable with the knowledge that we have the right programs in place to store and process those material safely.

Quite often, the terms hazard and risk are used interchangeably. That is wrong. The same inherent property that makes a substance hazardous also is the property that makes it useful. We have no choice but to accept some hazards in our midst (e.g., a knife in the kitchen, gasoline for cars), but that does not mean we have to accept an unreasonable risk. The dialogue needs to focus on how we can manage the risk to an acceptable level but still get the benefits associated with the material/process.

There is one sharp contrast between the West and Arkema incident. Most likely because of the coordination with emergency responders, the consequences in the Arkema incident were contained and loss of lives was avoided.

The whole experience with Harvey has again put issues regarding land-use planning front and center. We need to have a national dialogue and develop some consensus with regard to location of sites near sensitive population zones. Currently, we do not have any requirements either at the federal level or local level to lay out guidelines and enforce those guidelines with regard to location of sites near sensitive population zones or high density areas. By the same token, in as much as possible, we must also select the locations of hazardous materials sites away from areas that are prone to extreme weather.

We must have a national tracking system (database) for hazardous materials incident surveillance. There is presently no reliable means for evaluating the performance of industry in limiting the number and severity of accidental chemical releases. There is also limited data with which to prioritize efforts to reduce the risks associated with such releases. Without this information, there are no means to measure the effectiveness of present programs or to guide future efforts. An incident surveillance system could also be used to improve planning, response capability, and infrastructure changes.


10th

World Congress of Chemical Engineering October 1-5, 2017

The World Chemical Engineering Council (WCEC), the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE) and the European Society of Biochemical Engineering Sciences (ESBES) held this group of events as a unique opportunity to meet with researchers and specialists in practically all areas of chemical engineering and to improve strategy for the development of innovative processes that will be vital for the society of tomorrow. 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (WCCE-10) took place in Barcelona, Spain on October 1-5, 2017.

The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), European Process Safety Centre (EPSC), IChemE

Safety Centre (ISC), and Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center (MKOPSC) organized a joint Process Safety Symposium as part of 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (WCCE-10).

Why do incidents keep happening despite efforts on regulations, best practices and management systems? What are the trends for process safety performance as a whole? What are the issues behind our failure to learn? The scope of this joint process safety symposium is to have a dialogue on this call for action, and raise awareness and understanding on the importance of process safety amongst all stakeholders. The focus was to foster discussion among scientists, professors, engineers, industrial professionals by sharing process safety lessons learned, process safety leadership and management best practices, and highlighting the critical need to improve process safety education and competence. Presentations and posters from the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center included Dr. Sam Mannan’s “A Journey to Excellence in Process Safety Management,” as well as several student presentations and Dr. Hans Pasman’s “Can we make use of the methodological commonality in accident investigation and hazard identification to enhance process safety?” These presentations exemplified recent development in these areas of safety education and competence to raise the bar on process safety performance globally.

Report Sets out Safety Roadmap PROCESS safety incidents are not decreasing over time, and steps must be taken to reduce the repetition of previous failures – according to the IChemE Safety Centre (ISC) and the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center (MKOPSC).

A newly-published collaborative report, by the ISC and MKOPSC, called Process Safety in the 21st Century and Beyond outlines the challenges and potential solutions facing academia, industry, regulators, and society. These include ongoing issues that prevent progress, and the importance of making a business case for process safety. The report also addresses the issue of a growing population, taking inspiration from IChemE’s Chemical Engineering Matters policy document which sets out challenges for the chemical engineering profession in general.

The report was presented on 2 October at the 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering (WCCE-10) in Barcelona, Spain. ISC director Trish Kerin described figures from business risk analyst Marsh that

Sam Mannan and Trish Kerin signing

Dr. Sam Mannan presents “A Journey To Excellence…”


showed the rate of process safety incidents is largely unaltered across time. She said that a lack of competency is a huge challenge that will require continued effort to overcome.

“We still have people who don’t understand particular parts of their role or they don’t have information and training they need to do their job safely – and therefore we have incidents. We still have design of facilities occurring that are not using inherently safer design techniques. So we’re building in faults and inherent hazards in our systems still today,” said Kerin. She also reported that simply asking for funding engineering terms and language is “not going to work anymore. We must be able to write a compelling business case in business and financial terms – because if we actually want to get people to invest money in something that we need to do, they have to understand what their return is and what the requirement is on them.”

MKOPSC director Dr. Sam Mannan pointed out that without improvements, incidents will continue to happen, and support for safety programs’ efforts might dwindle. “If we don’t show progress in process safety then just think about it for yourself, as someone going to your supervisor and asking for more funds for process safety; what is the response going to be: ‘We’ve been investing in process safety for such a long time and incidents are still happening, why should we keep on investing?’ The same is true of regulations and academic programs.”

Also see the report in a dedicated feature published in the November issue of The Chemical Engineer.

Process Safety in the 21st Century and Beyond is currently open for comment. Professionals are invited to provide their input by contacting the MKOPSC via email ([email protected]). The report is available to download from the MKOPSC website: http://bit.ly/2D0RcpQ

Adapted from article by Neil Clark

Staff Reporter, The Chemical Engineer

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/isc-report-sets-out-safety-roadmap/

Dr. Mannan and Trish Kerin present project findings.

Student News New Students

Mazdak Mina

MS SENG Sunhwa Park

PhD CHEN

Tushar Goel

MS CHEN

Yongchul Cho

MS CHEN

Hongfei Xu

MS SENG Zhuoran Zhang

MS SENG

Interns Visiting Scholar

Agnes Aina

Texas A&M

University

Linlin Wang

China University

of Petroleum

Xiaoming Yan

China University

of Petroleum

Changlong Zhu

Professor

Nanjing Tech

http://www.ichemesafetycentre.org/resources/process-safety.aspx


Faculty Fellow Research

Ranjana Mehta, PhD

Worker fatigue is a serious risk on the job, contributing to injuries and deaths,

property damage and lost productivity. With around 18 billion dollars of economic

losses each year, fatigue-related incidents are a mounting problem. This is espe-

cially true in the oil and gas extraction (OGE) industry, which involves around-the-

clock work shifts and heavy physical and mental workloads. Between 2003 and

2014 there were more than 1300 on-the-job deaths in the OGE industry, giving it

a fatality rate seven times higher than the U.S. average.

Solving the problem of worker fatigue calls for quick and accurate assessment of fatigue; however, research

on the effectiveness of existing fatigue assessment tools in the OGE environment is scarce. To address this

shortcoming, Ranjana Mehta and S. Camille Peres, assistant professors at the Texas A&M School of Public

Health, together with Dr. M Sam Mannan, Director of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at Tex-

as A&M University, studied workplace fatigue in offshore OGE workers to compare different assessment

tools. Their study, published in the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, analyzed infor-

mation from a widely used fatigue survey and physiological data such as heart rate, respiration rate and

movement, to see how viable and accurate the measures were and how they compared to each other.

The first measure the study used was a series of fatigue assessment surveys. One survey asked about as-

pects of fatigue, such as physical exertion, physical discomfort, sleepiness, lack of energy and lack of moti-

vation, one considered acute and chronic fatigue and recovery, one looked at physical and mental fatigue

and one gave an overall fatigue score. In addition, subjects were asked questions about their work environ-

ment and its various demands to identify potential risk factors. The workers noted higher acute fatigue and

lack of recovery between shifts as well as increased sleepiness and decreased work effort. They also identi-

fied work environment aspects of increased work demand and pace and increased repetitive strain injury.

In addition to these surveys, the workers were fitted with sensors that can record heart rate, respiration, ac-

tivity levels and skin temperature. Similar sensors and protocols have been used for physiological monitor-

ing of construction workers and firefighters in previous research. The researchers used heart rate as the

main sign of fatigue and separated data based on movement in to three activity levels: stationary, moving

slowly and moving quickly. The study found that signs of fatigue, i.e., heart rate, were higher when activity

levels were higher.

Offshore Safety: Comparing worker fatigue assessment tools for offshore shift work


Workers who started on day shifts and switched to nights showed the lowest levels of fatigue with little differ-

ence between early in their time offshore and later. Other shift types showed higher levels of fatigue, and

surprisingly, those workers remaining on day shifts throughout showed the largest increases in heart rate.

“Wearables have significantly improved real-time physiological monitoring in the workplace. However, in

highly hazardous offshore environments, commercially available devices that are not intrinsically safer are

not appropriate, and those that are may not offer usability and efficient data analyses and management ca-

pabilities for real-time fatigue assessments. In fact, workers in our study found wearing the sensor belts tedi-

ous and somewhat uncomfortable for 24/7 monitoring. Thus, even though the sensor data was highly valua-

ble in determining fatigue levels based on shiftwork, their utility, and thereby sustainability, in OGE environ-

ments remains debatable,” says Mehta.

The research team also analyzed and compared the survey and physiological datasets to see if there was a

correlation between the two. They found that the survey items on physical discomfort correlated well with

heart rate, but the other fatigue measures or risk factors from the surveys showed no significant association

with physiological fatigue indicators. Interview data with the workers emphasized that in addition to physical

fatigue, workers were mentally tired - however existing fatigue surveys were unable to capture this.

“Workers found the surveys too long and reported that some of the items were unclear to them. Given that

fatigue in offshore environment must be easily and effectively assessed before it can be well understood,

the need for a more succinct measure is obvious,” says Peres.

Physiological data point to how shift work can affect fatigue, but the lack of clear association indicates a

need for a more appropriate method for assessing worker fatigue in the OGE industry. In addition, the study

showed how fatigue assessment tools will need to be tailored to workers. On average, the workers took

around 45 minutes to complete the surveys and found that many of the items had unclear wording. This

study highlighted the need for fatigue assessment tools that can be completed more quickly and are clearer

for this population. Further, it is important for future research to focus on developing reliable and valid ways

to assess fatigue that account for worker behavior and unique aspects of OGE industry work environments.

Such a tool will be vital for preventing deaths and injuries and reducing economic losses.

Faculty Fellow Research—Continued

Offshore Safety: Comparing worker fatigue assessment tools for offshore shift work


The case study explains how an emergency shutdown on an oxidation reactor caused fire and explosions at a Resorcinol plant in Japan. The analysis reveals that important information about the operating conditions and abnormal shutdown scenarios were not captured in the company’s Risk Assessment (RA) program. Differential Scanning Calorimetry and Adiabatic Calorimetry studies were reported in the company’s accident investigation committee report. By analyzing the materials involved and the conditions, the Hazardous Materials Identification System (HMIS) rating found there was moderate explosion risk which matched the DSC data from the report. A map of expected and unexpected events was provided in the study. The direct and intermediate causes were listed and the intermediate causes were expanded using contributing factors. Various contributing factors were grouped in an Ishikawa/Fish-bone diagram and these were compared with batch thermal runaway reaction incidents cited in literature between the period 1962 and 2013 in the United Kingdom. The four major contributing causes from this particular incident match with those reported in the literature. If this data had been analyzed in the risk assessment program of the company, this incident could have been averted.

Case History— Fire and Explosion at Resorcinol Plant—Mitsui Chemicals, Japan Presented by Bharatvaaj Ravi

Case History— LNG Explosion in Plymouth, WA Presented by Harold Escobar

The presentation introduced an incident from March 31, 2014 at an LNG processing and storage facility owned and operated by Williams Inc in Plymouth, Washington. The immediate cause of the incident was ignition during start-up of a flammable mixture in one of the Salt-Bath Heaters during the regeneration cycle. The mixture formed after air entered the process line. In addition, three manual valves around the dust filter were removed about eight months prior to the incident. After the initial ignition, a series of detonations in the line reached one of the absorbers, causing a brittle fracture resulting in overpressure and explosion. As a result of the explosion, five employees were injured and damages of more than $45 million was incurred. The following conclusions of the incident analysis were presented:

The incident investigation found some inconsistencies related to the statement of auto-ignition of

natural gas in the line, which was found to be unlikely due to the process conditions.

A safety review and an SOP must be performed at start-up on a regular basis to avoid gaps

leading to this type of incident.

Available RAGAGEP (i.e., API-571 & AGA Purging principles) was not followed by the company

demonstrating a lack of Management of Change in the processes.

A lack of design of the regeneration-cycle-process was clearly identified.

Research

August 11 Steering Committee Meeting: Case Histories


“Process Safety in Nanomaterials”

Pritishma Lakhe, PhD Chemical Engineering Student

Due to the potential of graphene for energy storage and composite filler applications, the large-scale production of graphene is of in-creasing commercial and academic interest. The existing direct methods of large-mass pris-tine graphene production are not economically scalable using current technology. Therefore, an alternate synthesis route to produce graphene-like material involving graphite oxide (GO) is pre-dominantly used. This method involves the oxidation of graphite to GO and its subsequent reduction to reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The proposed method has shown potential for bulk production at high yield. We aim to investigate graphite oxide production with a process safety lens as this tech-nology is developing, specifically in two aspects.

“Pipeline inner flow behavior—is that important during a release?”

Tatiana Flechas, PhD Chemical Engineering Student

Large amounts of substances are transport-ed in pipelines worldwide. This research pro-ject studies a hazard that needs to be quan-titatively assessed through discharge mod-els capable of accurately predicting the out-flow when a pipeline ruptures. The expan-sion following the rupture causes some liq-uids such as dense phase CO2, LNG or LPG to produce a two-phase release.

The main objectives of the project explained were: investigate how the accuracy of differ-ent equations of state affects the prediction of the depressurization process during the full-bore rupture of pipelines transporting liquefied gases; and improve the formulation of current puncture discharge models for flashing liquids. In order to achieve these objectives, use of CFD models are proposed to capture the physics of the system during the discharge process. Release experiments with dense-phase CO2 are used to validate the simulation results.

August 11 Steering Committee Meeting: Research Presentations


1. Zhang, B., Y. Liu, W. Zhu*, N. Gopalaswami* and M.S. Mannan, “Experimental Study of Bund Overtopping Caused by a Catastrophic Failure of Tanks,” Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Re-search, vol. 56, no. 42, 2017, pp 12227–12235.

2. Janardanan*, S., M.I. Papadaki, S.P. Waldram and M.S. Mannan, “Toward an inherently safer al-ternative for operating N-oxidation of alkylpyridines: Effect of N-oxide on lutidine – water phase separation,” Thermochimica Acta, vol. 656, October 2017, pp. 38-46.

3. Goel*, P., A. Datta and M.S. Mannan, “Industrial alarm systems: Challenges and opportunities,” Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Volume 50, Part A, November 2017, pp. 23-36.

4. Zhang, M., X. Wang, M.S. Mannan, C. Qian, J.Y. Wang, “A system dynamics model for risk per-ception of lay people in communication of chemical incident risks,” Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, vol. 50, Part A, November 2017, pp. 101-111.

5. Castillo-Borja, F., R. Vázquez-Román, E. Quiroz-Pérez, C. Díaz-Ovalle and M.S. Mannan, “A Re-silience Index for Process Safety Analysis,” Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, vol. 50, Part A, November 2017, pp. 184-189.

6. Yu*, M., N. Quddus, S.C. Peres, S. Sachdeva and M.S. Mannan, “Development of a Safety Man-agement System (SMS) for Drilling and Servicing Operations within OSHA Jurisdiction Area of Texas,” Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, vol. 50, Part A, November 2017, pp. 266-274.

7. Krishnan, P., B. Zhang, A. Al-Rabbat, Z. Cheng and M.S. Mannan, “Modeling the Blanketing and Warming Effect of High Expansion Foam Used for LNG Vapor Mitigation,” Proceedings of the 20

th Annual International Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center Symposium – Beyond Regu-

latory Compliance: Making Safety Second Nature, College Station, Texas, October 24-26, 2017, pp. 836-851.

8. Mendez, E., B. Zhang, H. Castaneda and M.S. Mannan, “Study of the Effects of Flow Conditions on the Performance of Corrosion Inhibitors Under CO2 Environment,” Proceedings of the 20

th An-

nual International Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center Symposium – Beyond Regulatory Compliance: Making Safety Second Nature, College Station, Texas, October 24-26, 2017, pp. 859-868.

9. Han, Z., S. Sachdeva, M. Papadaki and M.S. Mannan, “Prediction of NH4NO3 Thermal Decompo-sition Parameters in the Presence of Two Additives Using the Single Additive Experimental Val-ues,” Proceedings of the 20

th Annual International Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center

Symposium – Beyond Regulatory Compliance: Making Safety Second Nature, College Station, Texas, October 24-26, 2017, pp. 876-883.

10. “Failure to Learn,” Chemical Processing Webinar, August 17, 2017.

11. “The Evolution of Process Safety and the Need for Curriculum Changes,” Invited Seminar, Septem ber 19, 2017, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.

12. “A Journey to Excellence in Process Safety Management,” Keynote Speech, 10th World Congress

of Chemical Engineering, Barcelona, Spain, October 1-5, 2017.

13. Son, C., S. Park and M.S. Mannan, “Process Safety Lost in Silos: A Case Study of HDPE Silo Ex plosion in Yeosu, Korea,” 10

th World Congress of Chemical Engineering, Barcelona, Spain, Octo-

ber 1-5, 2017.

Recent Publications

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950423016300596

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950423016300596


14. Halim, S., S. Janardanan, T. Flechas and M.S. Mannan, “In Search of Causes Behind Offshore Oil and Gas Rig Fires,” 10

th World Congress of Chemical Engineering, Barcelona, Spain, October 1-5,

2017.

15. “A Journey to Excellence in Process Safety Management,” Keynote Speech, 2017 SOCMA Nation-al Chemical Safety Symposium, Houston, Texas, October 11-12, 2017.

16. “Human Factors in Process Safety in the Oil and Gas Industry: Preventing the Next Major Inci-dent,” Invited Speaker, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2017 Annual Meeting, Austin, Tex-as, October 12, 2017.

17. “A Synergistic Approach for Fire Protection and Process Safety Engineering to Improve Safety Per-formance,” Plenary Lecture, 8

th International Conference on Fire Science and Fire Protection Engi-

neering (ICFSFPE), Nanjing, China, October 28, 2017.

18. “Lessons Learned from Natural Disasters,” Keynote Speech, University of Queensland R!SK Sym-posium, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, November 20-22, 2017.

19. “Reaction Kinetics and Calorimetry Application for Process Safety Analysis,” Invited Lecture, Bukur Reaction Engineering and Catalysis Symposium, Doha, Qatar, December 4-5, 2017.

Recent Publications—Continued

Research Areas

Aerosols

Ammonium Nitriate Research

CFD Applications

Corrosion (SCC, Development of Sensors for Detection of MIC)

Cumulative Risk Assessment

Decontamination Foam for Chemical Mitiga-tion

DDT Studies

Dust Explosions

Facility Siting & Layout

Flammability Studies

Flame Retardant Systems

Fuzzy Logic & Probability Theory to Quantify Uncertainty in LOPA

Inherently Safer Design

Leading Indicators for Analysis for Offshore Operations

LNG Field Tests

LNG Source-Term Modeling

Metrics for Indistrial Supply Chain Consider-ing the Life-Cycle Analysis

Nanoparticles Flammability and Explosion

Process Sustainability Studies

Reactive Chemicals

Resilient Engineering Design

Safety Climate Assessment

Safety Culture


On Wednesday evening, Formosa Plastics Group sponsored a banquet for guests at the Traditions Club. Entertainment for the evening was provided by three Aggie Student organizations: Texas A&M Dance Program, Texas A&M Sahithya, and the Texas A&M Trombone Choir.

The presentation of the Merit and Service Awards is always a key highlight of the symposium. The annual Trevor Kletz Merit Award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to the advancement of education, research, or service activities related to process safety concepts and/or technologies. The contributions or accomplishments leading to the annual Merit Award need not be associated with the Center, but must fit within the central theme of the Center: Making Safety Second Nature. In establishing the Merit Award, the Steering Committee underscored the importance of promoting and recognizing significant contributions and accomplishments of practitioners and researchers worldwide.

The 2017 Trevor Kletz Merit Award was presented to Genserik Reniers. Genserik Reniers is an accomplished process safety and security researcher and practitioner. He serves in an editorial position for several publications, including the Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries. Genserik has published numerous reports, conference papers, archival papers, book chapters and books that have had wide-ranging impact in matters of process safety, security and risk assessment. His CV contains many more examples of his service to academia, industry and government in the field of process safety education and research.

The Harry H. West Service Award was established by the Steering Committee to honor and recognize individuals who have contributed directly to the success of the Center and have played a significant role in advancing the mission of the Center. The Service Award was presented to Dr. Robin Pitblado. Dr. Pitblado is one of DNV's leading risk analysts and is responsible for the HSE technical activity globally. He has 30 years experience in risk assessment activities covering safety management systems, technical risk, and major accident investigation. He is based in Houston but travels extensively to other DNV offices. He has been working for the last 3 years on developing an Operations Safety portfolio of services based around safety barriers, culture, and enhanced web-based safety communications.

This year, the Lamiya Zahin Memorial Safety Scholarship was presented to Roshan Sebastian. In fond and living memory of Lamiya Zahin, the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering and the Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center have established the Lamiya Zahin Memorial Safety Scholarship. On July 31, 2004, an explosion and fire occurred in a university apartment on the Texas A&M University campus. Four members of the family of Saquib Ejaz, a chemical engineering graduate student, were critically injured and hospitalized. Saquib’s mother and his four-year old daughter, Lamiya Zahin subsequently passed away a few days later in the intensive care burn unit at Galveston Hospital from injuries sustained in the fire. Graduate students in the Chemical Engineering department are encouraged to apply for the scholarship by writing a 1,000-word essay

on “Safety Innovations in Research Projects.”

Roshan’s essay is reproduced in its entirety on page 14 of this newsletter.

Symposium—Continued

Continued from page 1


Lamiya Zahin Memorial Safety Scholarship Essay Winner, Roshan Sebastian

The strife to make process industries economically viable and profitable is tending to make them bigger, integrated and more complex. But this comes with a price! The increase in complexity brings with it the increase in uncertainties and risks. Automation is rapidly replacing human operators because of the poor reliability of operators and high human error rate. The fact that probability of an instrument failure is about one thousandth of the probability of human error only justifies this trend. However, the human cognition and dynamic decision-making abilities are yet to be matched by the instrumentations, making human operator still an integral part of a process system. This complex network of human, automation, equipment, materials and energy comprises a process system which needs to be analyzed to better understand the uncertainties associated with it. The increased safety awareness, stringent safety regulations and a more vigilant public have helped bring down the number of process incidents, but their high consequences are still a great cause of concern. The present biggest challenge is to find a way to increase the uptime of industries with minimum incidents.

To tackle this problem, the risk must be analyzed and measured, so that they can be prevented. The risk analysis of a process plant predominantly involves hazard identification and evaluation of the consequences. The hazard identification using tools like Fault Tree Analysis, FMEA and HAZOP and consequence analysis using tools like Event Tree Analysis are extensively used by industries to design intrinsically safer plants and to modify the existing plants accordingly. The tools like LOPA facilitates adding layers of safeguards or barriers into the system to prevent occurrence of identified consequences or mitigating their impacts. These tools depend on expert judgment and historic data and are however best suited when the system is assumed to be static, meaning, these tools are not capable of incorporating the changes of a running plant such as, variations in process, mechanical integrity of equipment, change in management etc. The accidents in a running plant to a certain extend can be prevented by learning from the lagging indicators such as accidents, injuries and incidents that do not surpass a certain critical threshold of seriousness. But these incidents have certain cost attached to it. So, the industries strive to learn from the leading indicators like near miss incidents. But near misses are themselves a game of chance which is not the best strategy industry should adopt. Moreover, an industry which has a very good safety standard may not have sufficient leading or lagging indicators to predict future incidents. But this does not mean that the plant is safe, because a process upset can happen anytime if gone unnoticed. So, what is the best strategy to predict future incidents? What if we can detect process faults before it becomes a serious threat? With latest advancements in computing technology and big-data handling capabilities, industries are moving towards data- driven models to ensure reliability and safety of modern process industries. This data-driven methodology for process monitoring and fault diagnosis can identify the deviations in process parameters and judging the safe limit of operation ranges. A newer approach is a multivariate statistical process monitoring method, which utilize input and output information formation from the process. This method suits the dynamic nature of an operating plant and thus give a live update about any process deviations.

The developments in the Artificial Intelligence front has led to the birth to Bayesian Networks (BNs). BNs are a network of ‘Parent’ nodes and ‘Children’ Nodes inter connected with a cause-effect relationship. The Bayesian statistics which form the back bone of the BNs allow a dynamic

Roshan Sebastian and Dr. Mannan

Safety Innovations in Research Projects

Roshan Sebastian and Dr. Mannan


interconnection between the cause and effect nodes which makes it very useful in diagnosis of variable conditions. The use of BNs in risk analysis is gaining huge popularity due to its dynamic nature and flexibility. While Fault Tree and Event Tree Analysis give probability of a top incident based on the data collected in the past, the BNs can give a top event probability based on the present data collected from the process plant and can also include the human and organizational factors at the same time.

The risk factors that contribute to the top event in process plants can be broadly classified into short-term, mid-term and long-term. Short-term day-to-day varying factors are rupture of a flange gasket, failure of a valve, crack in a pipeline etc. The mid-term factors are the ones which vary over a week or month such as postponed inspections, delayed maintenance, change in chemicals etc. The long-term factors are wear in machines, corrosion, degradation of manpower skill, management complacency towards safety etc. All these factors and the safeguards can be incorporated into a BN and thus their contribution to the top event can be represented and understood. The flexibility of BN also allows us to add the cost factor into the network which then will give us the monetary impact of a top event.

What if the outputs of the fault detection techniques could be incorporated into the predictive analysis tool like BN? By this way we are trying to add the live risk factors into the BN and thus get a continuous influence of the process deviations on the top event and at the same time add the human and organizational factors that influence the operation. This combination of data-driven methodology of process monitoring and fault detection and predictive analysis tools like BN can help develop a continuous safety monitoring tool. This can be a very powerful tool which can help predict future incidents and direct us to take necessary corrective actions to prevent them.

The world is heading in the direction of data-driven technology and artificial intelligence and extensively using mathematical predictive tools to gauge the future uncertainties. These tools are rapidly improving due to extensive research in this field owing to its multivariate application in fields like medicine, finance, politics, engineering etc. Using these technologies in process engineering and process safety will surely help reap benefits by way of averting major disasters and consequent huge financial losses associated with it.


William Liao — Journeys of PSM Implementation at Taiwan FPG . Formosa Plastics Group (FPG) was founded in 1955 as a small private company. Over time, through acquisitions and embryonic growth, the company has now grown to its current size with total sales of 79 billion US dollars in 2014 including business of chemical, petrochemical, medical, electronic, and automobile. To sustain the healthy economic growth in the early of 90s, FPG constructed a naphtha cracking project so called “Sixth Naphtha” through the land reclamation with total of 8 kilo meter long by 6 kilo meter wide locat-ed at Mailiao of Yunlin County. Sixty-five units are operated in this complex.

Rick Engler — Employee Participation in Pre-venting Catastrophic Chemical Hazard. This presentation focused on the value of employee participation in preventing catastrophic chemical hazards. Included was discussion on why process hazard analyses are ignored or not followed-up; how in some cases front line employees had warned about risks that preceded incidents (or pre-vented them); current management health and safety programs that include employee participa-tion as a key element; and recommendations from Chemical Safety Board investigations that can en-hance worker engagement.

Peter A. Diakow — Comparison of Large-Scale Vented Deflagration Tests to CFD Simulations for Partially Congested Enclosures. A comparison be-tween the results from a test program carried out to characterize the blast load environment within BakerRisk’s Deflagration Load Generator (DLG) test rig, and predictions made using the FLACS computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code were presented. The test data was also compared to in-ternal peak pressure predictions made using the National Fire Protection Association’s Standard on Explosion Protection by Deflagration Venting (NFPA 68) [1]. The purpose of these tests was to provide data for comparison with standard meth-ods used to predict internal blast loads in a vented deflagration. The tests also provided a characteri-zation of the internal DLG blast load environment for equipment qualification testing.

Michael S. Schmidt — Containing Hydrogen Def-lagrations. Schroeder and Holtappels (2005) pub-lished data on the explosion characteristics of hy-drogen-air mixtures, looking at the effect of pres-sure and temperature on upper and lower explo-sive limits and the effect of pressure, temperature, and composition on explosion ratio, PEX/PO. He showed that the effect of increasing pressure on UEL and LEL is negligible to slightly advanta-geous, while the effect of increasing temperature was disadvantageous. They also showed that the explosion ratio was largely independent of operat-ing pressure, but very dependent on temperature and composition of hydrogen-air mixtures. Howev-er, the data was not developed to the point that it could be used as the basis of design and risk as-sessment.

Philip Myers — Storage Tank Overfill Vapor Cloud Explosions – Science, Causes, and Preven-tion. The 2009 Puerto Rico incident reminds us that few events are as devastating as a vapor cloud explosion initiated by a tank overfill. Any company that transfers a flammable liquid into a storage tank is vulnerable to the vapor cloud that is generated by a tank overfill. Because the liquid typically pours out from the top of the tank and falls into the secondary containment, the liquid may be contained but the vapor can easily traverse the secondary containment wall and find an ignition sources where either a vapor cloud explosion or a flash fire (deflagration) that may result. In either case, it is important to understand and prevent this type of incident.

Trish Kerin — The Future of Process Safety. Process safety has been practiced for several dec-ades, but it is only in recent years that it has be-come an established discipline. During this evolu-tion we have seen the development of risk assess-ment techniques and inherently safer design. In more recent time we have seen a focus on human factors and work on the cultural impacts. So what does the future hold? This paper explores the cur-rent challenges to process safety today and looks at possible strategies to overcome them. The chal-lenges have been identified from a series of global consultations which was done in collaboration with

2017 International Symposium Summary of Presentations


Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center. The strategies were identified with the assistance of a global committee of process safety leaders from industry, academia and regulators.

Brent A. Kedzierski — Operator Training Effec-tiveness with Simulation Based Learning. In to-day’s business environment, process automation is dramatically changing the way console opera-tors learn and perform. Console operators have more control loops than ever to manage, while processes and control systems are becoming in-creasingly more complex. There is increased need to train field and console operators to handle ab-normal situations to ensure process safety and plant reliability. Staffed largely with mature work forces, with many experienced operators retiring, companies need to ensure that they can continue to operate their plants in a safe, reliable and profit-able manner. The features and associated benefits of simulation based learning have been being ap-plied to high risk industries such as aviation, nucle-ar, medical as well as oil and gas with increasing success. The focus from these industries is driven by a variety of factors such as safety, costs, regu-lation and advances in simulation technology. This session will present the primary types of simulation based learning methods, benefits for improving safety and emergency response as well as the de-cision points for when to select simulation as the method of choice. Simulation is a tremendous learning method that enables learners to practice, perform “what if” analysis and maybe most im-portantly provide the opportunity to learn and grow in a safe, forgiving environment that applies realis-tic scenarios and exercises.

Gregg Kiihne — Does your Asset Integrity Pro-gram Neglect your most Important Asset? Industry has a strong focus on maintaining the integrity of mechanical assets to “Keep it in the pipes.” How-ever, the key assets any company has with re-spect to process safety are the human assets, es-pecially operations and first line supervision. Cost-savings and Lean programs seek to save money through staffing reductions and other measures, but the unintended impact of these measures often threaten the integrity of the human asset base. What are the type of programs that may uninten-

tionally threaten our Human Asset Integrity, and what can we do to strengthen the integrity of that asset base?

Stephanie C. Payne — Benchmarking Safety Culture Survey Practices in the Chemical Process Industry. Safety surveys assess employees’ shared perceptions of the policies, procedures, and practices concerning safety. Benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business process-es and performance metrics to industry bests or best practices from other companies. In this study, we were interested in benchmarking the practice of conducting safety culture surveys and various details about these practices. Some specific re-search questions we were interested in answering were (1) Which organizations conduct safety cul-ture surveys and how frequently do they do so? (2) What kinds of questions are asked (process safe-ty, personal safety)? (3) Who completes the sur-vey? (managers, internal/external contractors) (4) How are the survey results used and do they help? In this study, we focus on 41 survey responses from 41 unique operating companies in the oil and gas and chemical processing industries

Ryan Morton — “Facility Level” Hazard Analysis Program within Management of Change. Interpre-tation of SEMS rule’s “facility level” hazard analy-sis mandate leaves operators freedom to interpret and analyze best approaches to ensure operation-al and process safety hazards are under control. Last year’s MKOCPSC presentation on Ana-darko’s Facility Level Hazard Analysis (FLHA) Pro-gram outlined our approach and focus to adhere to regulation while focusing time and money on where we believe risk reduction is most important. This presentation outlines how Anadarko’s FLHA Program continues further into continuous opera-tional and process safety risk management within Brownfield engineering projects such as subsea tie-backs, as well as, the everyday management of change process.

Phillip Hodge — Commonly Encountered Prob-lems in the Safety-Focused Design of Capital Projects. The design and construction of a new building is often a significant investment for capi-tal projects. As a result, there are typically many

2017 International Symposium Summary of Presentations — Continued


competing design considerations, such as: land use, interconnectivity, access for operations per-sonnel, building codes, personnel safety, and cost. To minimize the number of costly design iterations, it is vital that overall project goals for the building be firmly established, communicated, and imple-mented effectively. Unfortunately, many projects suffer from a misstep in one or more of these are-as.

Scott Davis — Is my facility at risk? Under-standing the risks associated with low burning ve-locity compounds. A key factor when performing risk assessments and facility siting studies is to assess the explosion and flash fire risk of combus-tible fluids. There are accurate and established methods to do so when dealing with flammable fluids that have laminar burning velocities (LBVs) around 40 cm/s (e.g., most hydrocarbons). There is currently a need to establish equivalently accu-rate methods for mildly flammable fluids that have LBVs less than 10 cm/s (e.g., R-32 and ammonia). The use of such fluids is growing, particularly in the heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrig-eration (HVAC&R) industries as the result of on-going efforts to phase out working fluids with high global warming potential.

Ewan D. Ross — Process Safety Competence Assurance. Competence is a critical component of an organization’s success—one that is also very relevant for process safety. In fact, process safety competence can help ensure compliance with reg-ulatory requirements and can be an important business improvement driver, particularly when it comes to process safety risk.

Chris Kourliouros — New Paradigms in Mitigat-ing Unplanned Events Caused by Human Error. Statistics from several industry and government sources indicate that the OSHA PSM process safety incident frequency has dropped dramatical-ly. However, the improvement trend seems to have plateaued. It has also been noted that opera-tor error was identified as either the primary or secondary root cause in over 80% of these events. Much has been accomplished by employing com-puter systems, behavioral policies, and compli-

ance actions in various stages of implementation. However, the desired results are not being achieved. The asymptote in performance could be due to uncoordinated technology implementation and policy enforcement which are not synergistic in achieving the overall goal. It is hypothesized that the next paradigm in process safety and hu-man productivity will require an integrated ap-proach to man-machine-method solutions.

Justin Trice - -Incident Management System for a Global Company. The global implementation of an incident management and action tracking system is no easy task. There is a multitude of good in-tentions and lots of moving parts. Although every-one is trying to do the right thing from initial rollout, there are lessons learned along the way that will, in the end, solidify your already existing incident management system. A global, mid-size company of about 3,200 employees learned and applied these lessons during a three-phase incident man-agement system rollout to three different geo-graphical areas: the Americas, Asia and Europe. The challenges faced were not only geographical and cultural; they were also a result of the different legacy safety philosophies that come with joint ventures and new partnerships in the ever chang-ing chemical industry. The presentation discussed the initial approach all the way through to the end. Going back to basics: defining what an incident is, what types of incidents would be tracked, and what the requirements for an investigation were going to be. This paired with the lessons that were learned after each phased rollout resulted in the successful implementation of a global incident management procedure and software system; the lessons being continuously learned would make for an even more successful rollout in the future.

Lubna Ahmed — Review: Overview of flame re-tardant additives, mechanism of flame retardancy and characterization techniques for polymer nano-composites. Fire retardancy of plastics is becom-ing increasingly important due to the widespread application of plastics in daily life and the subse-quent fire hazard associated with it. A wide variety of flame retardant additives have been historically used; however, many of them have been restricted



due to toxicity, lack of thermal stability perfor-mance etc. This study provides a current state-of-the-art review on flame retardant additives that can be employed in polymers for better fire perfor-mance. The presentation also describes the haz-ards associated with burning of polymers, charac-teristic flame retardant properties of nanocompo-sites and material characterization methods ap-plied for determining their efficiency. Further pre-sented was a fundamental understanding of the flame retardancy of polymers, through the syner-gistic interaction among the nanofillers: ones that cause a physical barrier effect and the others that cause catalytic charring effect in the condensed phase, by studying the kinetics and the mass and heat transfer processes during pyrolysis.

Simon Jones — Do We Really Know How To Manage Risk? Process Safety approaches devel-oped and implemented over the past 20 – 30 years have, few would argue, enabled us to im-prove the design basis for our facilities. The use of a risk-based approach is commonplace and in-deed a requirement of many regulatory bodies around the world. Despite this, industry continues to experience catastrophic accidents which, when the consequences are dire, receive a lot of media outrage usually followed by multiple investigations and calls for legislative change and / or criminal proceedings. In most parts of the world where Oil, Gas and Petrochemical operations occur we have a societal intolerance of such events, generally de-manding legislation and many would say a strong intent from the industry to operate safely. Yet we still see major incidents occurring at a steady rate each year so the question has to be asked wheth-er we in the industry really understand what it means to manage risk.

Horng-Jang Liaw — Tasks Derived from Abnor-mal Conditions of Processes. Hazards, which re-sulted from operation of improper tasks derived from process abnormal conditions, cannot be iden-tified effectively by the traditional hazard identifica-tion methods, such as HAZOP and JSA. A method based on the hazardous information of chemicals to identify the hazards of tasks derived from abnor-mal conditions of processes was proposed. A

checklist for the intrinsic chemical hazard identifi-cation and a worksheet for the process/task haz-ard identification were included in the proposed method. The intrinsic hazards of chemicals can be identified based on the hazardous information of chemicals, such as those provided on SDS. Com-bining with the enabling condition of the chemical hazards and the possible tasks derived from pro-cess abnormal conditions, the tasks derived from process abnormal conditions, which will supply the condition of initiating the chemical hazards, were identified. Based on the identified tasks, the poten-tial hazards of the tasks can be identified by a pre-designed worksheet, and the safeguards and the suggestions can be identified. An example of using the proposed method to identify the hazards of tasks derived rom process abnormal conditions was included in this manuscript.

Janardhanan Kallambettu — Application of func-tional safety to electrical power equipment and systems in process industries. In process indus-tries, the application of functional safety in prevent-ing major incidents is a well-established practice. The functional safety standard IEC 61511[1] is ap-plied to the safety instrumented system (SIS) pro-tection layers to avoid the undesired events or re-duce the likelihood of the events or impacts due to failures in the process, process equipment, or its control system including human interactions. How-ever, there are risks of catastrophic incidents due to electrical equipment failures as well. Therefore, one should not underestimate the importance of the management, design, installation, operation, and maintenance of electrical power systems and protection devices. Regulatory authorities, in some countries, require the owners or operators to ad-dress the risks that arise from electrical equipment failure.

Todd Muscroft — Exceeding Regulatory Compli-ance in Procedure Management: A Journey to-wards Operational Excellence. Proving compliance to well defined and explicitly stated regulations re-garding process safety sounds simple; however, in practice it involves a huge effort. The sheer vol-ume of information required to be compliant in



highly regulated environments can be overwhelm-ing. The large number of people involved com-pound the complexity, and legacy systems simply do not cut it anymore.

Walter Kessler — Best Practices for Management of Change (MOC) and Pre Start-up Safety Re-views (PSSR). Since the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) implemented its Process Safety Management Program (PSM) in 1992, two elements; Management of Change (MOC) and Pre Start-up Safety Reviews (PSSR) continue to be two of the more challenging ele-ments for companies to implement and maintain. These two elements alert and inform personnel that a process change is taking place, and that change has been looked at and reviewed by the relevant facility personnel.

Pritishma Lakhe — Study of Safer Storage and Handling of Graphite Oxide. Due to the immense potential of graphene for energy storage and com-posite filler applications the large-scale production of graphene is of increasing commercial and aca-demic interest. The existing direct methods of large-scale graphene production are not economi-cal using current technology. Therefore, an alter-nate synthesis route to produce graphene-like ma-terial involving graphite oxide (GO) is pre-dominantly used. This method involves the oxida-tion of graphite to GO and its subsequent reduc-tion to reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The pro-posed method has shown potential for bulk pro-duction at high yield. However, prior studies have shown that GO can undergo explosive decomposi-tion under certain conditions. There is no docu-mented process safety incident specifically related to GO so far but GO is an energetic material that can undergo explosive thermal reduction, A num-ber of unanticipated process incidents have oc-curred due to inadequate study and understanding of energetic materials stored in large quantities. As research is moving towards large scale manufac-turing of GO, the motivation of this research is to investigate potential process safety issues with bulk GO storage and handling. Specifically, we ex-amine the underlying causes of explosive behavior

of bulk GO and propose safer storage and han-dling conditions. Additional studies are conducted in an Advanced Reactive System Screen Tool (ARSST) calorimeter to understand the effect of storage temperature, impurities, pH, and process conditions. This research will be beneficial in as-sessing the hazards of GO and enhancing safety of rGO production processes over their life cycles.

Mahesh Murthy — Tsunami as a credible hazard – A case for safety. Seismic sea wave, commonly called a Tsunami is caused due to large scale dis-placement of water column. The stored energy due to the wave impacting the plant equipment on the shoreline is enormous. In the recent past tsu-namis, have impacted countries like Thailand, Ja-pan, Chile and many more places resulting in cata-strophic loss of human life and significant property damages. Traditionally tsunamis have been con-sidered as natural calamities.

Akshat Khirwal — Optimizing Fire & Gas Detec-tion Coverage and Layout using 3D mapping tools. A Fire & Gas Detection System enables detection of a gas release or a fire scenario and raises alarms and/or initiates appropriate control action (e.g., system isolation, deluge, and facility shut-down). This serves to minimize the potential for escalation of events that could lead to a cata-strophic damage. To achieve this objective, the coverage of fire and gas detectors should be suffi-cient to detect gas leaks and fires and this should be set as a performance requirement. Risk as-sessments which take credit for successful detec-tion of a release activating isolation and blowdown must be required to demonstrate the assumed per-formance can be achieved. Relying on convention-al approaches based on experience and engineer-ing judgement for developing fire and gas detector layout may not be sufficient. A 3D evaluation of the process unit helps to improve the coverage and demonstrate performance, taking into account de-tector specifications (technology, sensitivity, detec-tion range, etc.), voting logic and reliability.

Alek Hamparian — Identifying Safety Culture Deficiencies in Facilities with the Potential for High



Consequence/Low Probability Events. One of the key underlying causes of most major accidents can be traced to deficiencies within the organiza-tion’s safety culture. The Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has directly identified safety culture defi-ciencies in their recent investigations including the March 2005 BP Texas City accident and the June 2013 Williams Geismar Olefins Plant accident. There are many reasons as to why safety culture deficiencies exist within an organization and are not identified and corrected by those working with-in the organization. An example could be Drift to Danger that is often addressed in Resilience Engi-neering related discussion. Another concern is that high consequence/low probability events are rare, which results in a low risk perception by employ-ees within systems that have the potential for se-vere events.

Mindy E. Bergman — A decade of research col-laboration on safety climate at Texas A&M Univer-sity. Over the past decade, faculty in the Depart-ment of Psychology who specialize in industrial-organizational (IO) psychology have collaborated with the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Cen-ter (MKOPSC) on the topic of safety climate. The presentation reviews the strides made in safety climate research over the last decade, focusing in particular on the work produced at Texas A&M University. The goals of this retrospective are: (a) to bring MKOPSC symposium attendees up-to-date on the state-of-the-science for safety climate research, (b) to demonstrate the value of MKOP-SC’s investment in social science research, and (c) to encourage continued collaboration between social scientists and engineers in improving safety climate.

Chen-yang Li — Dynamic Risk Prediction Model for Corrosion Leakage Accidents of a Chloride Process Based on Experimental Data of Steel Cor-rosion. A chloride process is especially prone to leakage accidents via tank rupture and pipeline perforation, both of which are usually caused by corrosion. Leakage accidents may not occur fre-quently but nevertheless results in explosions, poi-soning and other severe consequences. The cor-

rosion is not triggered by liquid chlorine itself but by liquid chlorine containing water, which induces a series of chemical reactions, and the corrosion that occurs in the environment of a chloride pro-cess largely depends on the surrounding condi-tions, such as the chloride ion concentration, flow velocity, environmental temperature and pressure. As such, this presentation first discusses experi-mental research conducted on the corrosion of liq-uid storage tanks and pipelines made with the steel Q345 and 20g, respectively. Finally, a proba-bility prediction model for the corrosion state was instituted based on Markov chains. The predicted results of the Gray Markov model are capable of acquiring both the thickness of the corrosion at any time and the probability of the corrosion state of steel in the future during the overall operational cycle of the chloride process dynamically. These prediction results can also provide guidance for maintenance that will help to reduce the probability of accidents caused by corrosion in a chemical process and alleviate such dangerous situations.

Donald DuPont — Cost-Based Analysis for Risk Reduction. Owner/Operators are inundated with recommendations generated from various hazard identification and risk assessment studies. While there are a plethora of qualified engineering firms, consultants, and in-house specialists that produce lists of executable action items, there is very little guidance provided to owners to aid in the prioriti-zation and allocation of scarce resources to meet the performance requirements of the company’s process safety policy. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), through its Process Safety Management (PSM) standard (29 CFR 1910.119), has requirements regarding the tracking, closure, and documentation of recom-mendations from PHAs, PSSRs, incident investi-gations, MOCs, and compliance audits. However, the PSM standard is a performance-based stand-ard; therefore, there is no specific language re-garding prioritization and implementation of resolu-tions. The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) has published literature such as “Tools for Making Acute Risk Decisions with Chemical Pro-cess Safety Applications.” This document provides tools that aid in the application of a consistent and



logically sound approach to ensure that appropri-ate resources are made available and effectively allocated to risk reduction activities. Yet this guid-ance falls short of providing a workable process to answer the question, “now that I have this long list of things that needs to be done, what do I do with it?” This paper presented a practical approach for managing risks usinga cost-based evaluation to allocate economic resources to a practical risk re-duction program.

Denise Chastain-Knight — Functional Safety Management Planning. Successful implementation of the Functional Safety standards, IEC-61508 and IEC-61511 (or ANSI/ISA 84), begins with robust management planning. The Functional Safety Lifecycle includes activities at all stages of a pro-cess lifespan, including conception of a project, hazards identification, specification, design and implementation, verification and validation, opera-tion and maintenance, and modification and de-commissioning. Each phase of the lifecycle has specific requirements for the activities that must be completed, goals to be achieved by those activities and expectations of the documentation. The stand-ards are performance-based, so for a turnkey pro-ject, the path to compliance is defined by the pro-ject engineering management firm. A written Func-tional Safety Management Plan (FSMP) defines the desired path and success metrics to ensure functional safety objectives are met at all stages of the lifecycle. This document reviews the require-ments for functional safety management planning, and shared the experiences of one large capital project where the lifecycle planning and execution failed expectations.

Amit K Aglave — Plan to Fail. The process indus-try has widely adopted the Functional Safety Standards IEC61508 [1] and IEC61511 [2] for achieving the Functional Safety. These standards lay the framework for achieving functional safety by considering the entire life-cycle of the safety instrumented system (SIS). Typical SIS safety life-cycle phases and functional safety assessment stages are illustrated in Figure-7 of IEC61511-1 [2]. The design and engineering of the SIS are

most often focused on achieving the required risk reduction for the safety instrumented functions (SIF). However, with this single-minded focus, the design and engineering of the SIS frequently pro-gresses without a well thought out safety plan. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” – Ben-jamin Franklin

Aniket Patankar — Lowering Capital Costs when Evaluating Relief Systems - A Collaborative Ap-proach. Continued uncertainty in future oil and gas prices has increased the sensitivity around energy-related developments, leading to elevated levels of financial scrutiny. This is making owner- operators and Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) companies continue to look for smart op-tions to increase their overall project delivery per-formance in order to maximize the Net Present Value (NPV).

Sathish Natarajan — Changes to industry guid-ance for relief and blowdown system design and the impact on existing infrastructure. As the last line of defense for process and equipment integri-ty, relief, blowdown and flare systems need to be adequately designed and maintained. Systems need to be periodically re-assessed so that they operate safely throughout the life of the facility that they help protect. This talk highlighted the im-portance of ensuring flare and relief systems re-main fit for purpose throughout their lifetime main-taining accountability for plant modifications, changes to operations, and changes to industry guidance and regulation. Recognizing high profile incidents involving relief and flare systems from Grangemouth to Westlake and to a number of re-cent incidents that have led to loss of containment due to excessive vibrations and brittle fracture of the flare piping, we show that the root cause of these incidents can be linked to failure to recog-nize hazards and perform adequate analysis, which is fundamental to Process Hazards Analysis programs under OSHA 3133.

Neil Prophet — Statistical Analysis of Site-wide Relief Systems Study and the Deficiencies That Were Identified. The presentation covered credible



typical mitigation options available to resolve inad-equate pressure relief and flare systems. Typical reasons of inadequacy for pressure relief and flare systems are presented and common mitigation op-tions for those inadequacies are covered. Then, examples of uncommon and unique mitigation op-tions are provided including options such as ad-vanced calculations and pressure relief valve sta-bility analysis.

Amol V. Deshpande — Safety Instrumented By-pass Management. Proper management of Safety Instrumented Function (SIF) bypasses during pro-cess plant operation can be challenging and could compromise process safety if the SIF is bypassed longer than its allowable maximum time interval. Safety bypass procedures are usually written on site to comply with OSHA 1910.119 and IE-C61511. However, in practice, safety bypass management can be difficult due to a lack of readi-ly available process safety information, lack of op-erator awareness and the existence of a produc-tion throughput oriented culture.

James E. Johnston — Benefits of a Baseline Hazardous Area Classification Assessment for a Facility with Limited Personnel Resources. The benefits of having a baseline Hazardous Area Classification assessment and compliance assess-ment for a facility processing flammable hydrocar-bons having limited personnel resources was de-scribed to demonstrate how OSHA’s requirements for documenting process safety information and process safety studies link to this baseline Hazard-ous Area Classification assessment and compli-ance assessment. A common sense approach for completing a baseline Hazardous Area Classifica-tion assessment and why it is a key to reducing resources required to maintain it will be discussed.

Harold Warner — Shockwave Arrested. Dynamic Air Shelters’ newest model completely defeats the shock wave, eliminating the transmission of shock into the interior space. This first ever innovation results in more safe habitat, the ability to protect equipment and the ability to protect non-blast re-

sistant buildings by placing a protective shock re-sistant sheath over the existing structure.

Kate Hildenbrandt — Reducing Project Lifecycle Cost with an Integrated Safety Lifecycle Suite. The international functional safety standard IEC 61511 provides the safety lifecycle as a steadfast guide-line to assess and mitigate risk for manufacturing processes including refineries, chemical, petro-chemical, pulp and paper, and power plants. To achieve a functionally safe system, it is essential to follow each requirement in the standard. How-ever, consistent execution is difficult to achieve and often depends on the tools used to perform analysis and specification of the safety instrument-ed system. The need for a consistent work pro-cess was fulfilled with a fully integrated safety lifecycle software suite. Lifecycle tools often in-clude a module for each stage of the safety lifecy-cle. Use of the full suite ensures quality assess-ment and execution of a safety instrumented sys-tem, as well as compliance to the safety standard. An integrated tool would also streamline these tasks, easily transferring data from one module to another to save the user time and money.

Keith Lapeyrouse — Data Driven Risk Based Process Safety – Why Care, How to Get It and How to Keep It. The establishment of metric based management was clearly established in Process Safety Leading and Lagging Metrics. To demon-strate this, two metrics from ISA-TR84.00.04 Ap-pendix R are used to illustrate the necessity of an information repository and associated data visuali-zation. These metrics are: percentage of Safety Instrument Functions (SIF) with incomplete Safety Requirement Specification (SRS) information and percentage of SRS completed before project /MOC approval.

Michael Washington — What process safety management programs are needed at non-PSM sites? We all agree on the common stance that no one in any industry desires the occurrence of an accident. This belief is a common premise no mat-ter what respective industry one may work in or for. A serious fire, a permanent injury, toxic re-



lease or the fatality of an employee or owner can cause the loss of profit, reputation or even an en-tire business. Even if you are not a facility or small company that manages Highly Hazardous Chemi-cals and happen to fall under the OSHA Process Safety Management or EPA Risk Management Program, you still want to prevent such losses. One may not have a major budget to implement extravagantly structured safety, health and compli-ance management systems that may bring suc-cess but are very expensive to maintain for smaller or midsize facilities. [3] You do, however, need to understand your risks and apply recognized EHS measures to mitigate and manage those risks.

Simon Lucchini — I thought I had the right roadmap for implementing a safety system; help! International standards IEC 61511 and IEC 61508 provide guidance for the safety system life-cycle phases. Armed with this knowledge, the safety de-sign engineer may feel that he/she can tackle any project. However, the scope of a safety system project can vary considerably. The SIS may be part of a new multibillion dollar process plant, a facility revamp or just involve the addition of a few safety functions to an existing installation. Even though the basic steps may be similar, the execu-tion will vary considerably depending on the over-all scope and makeup of the project.

Ronald Thomas — Institute of Makers of Explo-sives Safety Analysis for Risk (IMESAFR): A Tol-erable Risk Criteria – What Is Safe Enough? The Institute of Makers of Explosives (IME), a non-profit safety and security organization founded in 1913, is known for its industry best practices, Safety Library Publications (SLP), some of which have been incorporated into rules by regulatory agencies. The IME developed the first commercial storage, quantity distance (Q/D) table titled “The American Table of Distances” (ATD). It was devel-oped by IME’s legacy association in 1910 and was originally based on observations of structural dam-age from 117 accidental explosions involving small to very large amounts of explosives, primarily dy-namite and black powder. In 1930, the IME pub-lished a book, compiled by Ralph Assheton, called

the “History of Explosions on Which the American Table of Distances was Based” (Assheton, 1930)1. The distance in feet in the ATD were founded on the measurements at which inhabited buildings sustained substantial structural damage from the accidental detonation of explosives. For example, minor damage such as window glass breakage and the “shaking down” of plaster was not consid-ered substantial structural damage. Other damage to property that was readily repairable was also not considered “substantial.” It was concluded that unless some integral portion of the building was damaged, the occupants would not be subjected to serious risks.

Steve Arendt — Re-Energizing Industry Risk Management and Coordination and Communica-tion. EPA promulgated its risk management pro-gram (RMP) rule in the mid-90s when many com-panies invested a lot of effort in compliance with the rule, coordinating with local emergency plan-ners and responders, and communicating RMP information to the public. After 9/11, national priori-ties refocused onto security matters; community outreach activity and investment (nationwide) took a backset and appeared to decline over the next decade.

Stewart W. Behie — Buckets to Disaster: What to Avoid in Making Critical Decisions. An approach to the development of techniques and tools to teach risk-based decision analysis and complex decision analysis to minimize the disastrous outcomes of critical decisions taking in the worlds of plant oper-ations and engineering was presented. Risk Based Decision Management (RBDM) and critical deci-sion analyses are not taught in the curricula of the engineering programs at any major university. En-gineers and other technical staff are promoted based on their abilities and the assumption that their experience will guide them to make robust decisions when needed particular in the heat of the moment when time is of the essence. The his-torical incident record brings this assumption into question. Decisions made by individuals or teams on behalf of companies can lead to disastrous out-comes and significant consequences that have the potential to cause significant losses. This work



proposes a basis for the development of materials to prepare curricula to teach RBDM as part of un-dergraduate and graduate courses in a very struc-tured and logical manner.

Mark Wingard — Key Lessons from the Exx-onMobil Baton Rouge Refinery Isobutane Release and Fire. On November 22, 2016, an isobutane release and fire seriously injured four workers in the sulfuric acid alkylation unit at the ExxonMobil Refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (“Baton Rouge refinery”). During removal of an inoperable gear-box1 on a plug valve,2 the operator performing this activity removed critical bolts securing the pressure-retaining component of the valve known as the top-cap.3 When the operator then attempt-ed to open the plug valve with a pipe wrench,4 the valve came apart and released isobutane into the unit, forming a flammable vapor cloud. The isobu-tane reached an ignition source within 30 seconds of the release, causing a fire and severely burning four workers who were unable to exit the vapor cloud before it ignited.

Brenton Drake — A Case Study: Autocatalytic Behavior and its Consideration for a Chemical Pro-cess with General application to Handling, Ship-ping, and Reactive Relief Design. Autocatalysis is a generally well understood phenomenon. Howev-er, since autocatalytic molecules do not have a fixed energy release rate for a given temperature, like nth order reactions, additional considerations are required to ensure safe shipping, handling and relief device sizing. Also, unlike nth order reac-tions, autocatalytic reactions have an induction time and it is associated with reaching a critical concentration of a catalytic species. Once the in-duction time is exhausted the reaction accelerates even under isothermal conditions (i.e. dT/dt = f (T,Ccat). Often a thermo-kinetic model is required for adequate hazard evaluation. During model de-velopment a first order reaction scheme is often used as a starting point. Such an approach typical-ly leads to an unrealistically high apparent activa-tion energy to get a reasonable fit to the data. Since time impacts the reaction rate, induction times need to be determined to build an accurate kinetic model. Once induction times are deter-

mined as a function of temperature, adequate lay-ers of protection and operating discipline can be determined for safe handling. This paper de-scribes: 1) Identification and confirmation of auto-catalytic behavior, 2) Induction time model devel-opment, and 3) Application to storage, shipping, and reactive relief design. For reactive relief vent sizing, consideration is given not only to credible failure scenarios that may result in relief device activation, but also recovery from contained un-planned events.

Eloise Roche — Techniques for Improving Opera-tor Response to Abnormal Operations. Safety alarms are among the most commonly identified instrumented safeguards implemented to reduce the risk of hazardous events. Unlike safety inter-locks or permissives, alarm safeguards are entirely dependent on operator action to be effective. The probability of an operator error in taking the need-ed action can be made worse by inadequate con-sideration of human factors during the design of the control system and human interfaces in the control room and field. Techniques that can im-prove the likelihood of successful operator re-sponse to a safety alarm include: selecting alarm setpoints to allow more time for response, specify-ing safeguard sequencing to reduce impact of ab-normal event recovery, optimizing human machine interface (HMI) displays to support effective trou-bleshooting during abnormal events, challenging the alarm interface design to verify clarity and ease of use, training operators using process sim-ulators to improve speed and accuracy of trouble-shooting during abnormal events, periodically vali-dating the operator’s effectiveness in responding to abnormal operation and alarm events, manag-ing the oversight and safety culture for desired op-erator action.

Henk W.M. Witlox — Verification and Validation of Consequence Models for Accidental Releases of Toxic or Flammable Chemicals to the Atmos-phere. Consequence modelling software for acci-dental releases of flammable or toxic chemicals to the atmosphere includes discharge modelling, at-mospheric dispersion modelling and evaluation of flammable and toxic effects. First discharge calcu-



lations are carried out to set release characteris-tics for the hazardous chemical (including depres-surisation to ambient). Scenarios which may be modelled includes releases from vessels (leaks or catastrophic ruptures), short pipes or long pipes. Releases considered include releases of sub-cooled liquid, superheated liquid or vapour; un-pressurised or pressurised releases; and continu-ous, time-varying or instantaneous releases.

Valerio Cozzani — Cyber Threats in the Chemical and Process Industry. Chemical and process facili-ties (CPFs) are often characterized by the storage and processing of hazardous materials, frequently in large amounts and at severe temperatures and pressures. Thus, CPFs are recognized as an at-tractive target for a variety of criminal categories: from terroristic organizations to common thieves and vandals. A set of physical protection systems are usually installed and periodically revised in or-der to avoid intrusion and, eventually, to mitigate consequences that could arise from malicious at-tacks. However, less attention was posed to date to the possibility of interference with the process by intrusions via the cyber space. Basic control loops, frequently used in CPFs, are ruled by com-puters responsible for their correct operation. These usually are interconnected one to each oth-er (assembling the plant net), and to the external internet via the corporate LAN. Process control system governs all the operative and safety func-tions in medium and large facilities, and hence it has the potential to create outcomes even more severe than those triggered by physical actions. Cyber-attackers belong to a wide range of sub-categories, each characterized by precise intents and tools. Several incidents due to cyber threats were reported in recent years, and the trend seems to be increasing. Cyber-attacks might tar-get industrial facilities exploiting a focused intru-sion via a hacker tactic, or employing intrusive tools as viruses or worms. Usually the worm/virus is not tailored for industrial control systems, but it breaches the company network protection compro-mising operations. Defense-in-depth concepts to address process interference and intentional re-leases due to cyber threats were developed. Haz-ard identification was carried out by a specific pro-

cedure to understand how the process system might react after a cyber intrusion: disturbances caused on the plant have been systematically ana-lyzed and combined. Although no specific protec-tion of software systems is required, a range of po-tential scenarios having different severity emerged. Results point out that cyber threats pose specific process hazards that need to be included in the safety assessment and management sys-tems of CPFs.

Tom Bischoff — Establishing Safety System Re-quirements for Onshore Facilities. As Oil and Gas operating companies have evolved, complexities that were typically only existent in large facilities have found their way into way into all areas of op-eration. Single well pad are in the past and larger, complex pads are the way of the future. As this occurs, the need to develop consistent practices for hazard analysis are evident. One such case is with the design and installation of safety systems. The requirements for safety systems vary greatly between different types of operational environ-ments. For offshore platforms a checklist ap-proach utilizing API RP 14C, Recommended Prac-tice for Analysis, Design, Installation, and Testing of Basic Surface Safety Systems for Offshore Pro-duction Platforms, is employed to assess baseline requirements for various pieces of equipment. The application of API RP 14C is effectively built into the regulations for offshore platforms, making the analysis mandatory. For onshore facilities, both regulated by OSHA and not, a similar requirement does not exist. Therefore, large inconsistencies are present in the assessment and application of safety systems. For a larger facility, typically a Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA) or other semi-quantitative analysis is conducted to establish and confirm safety system requirements. However, there are several operations where LOPA is not utilized or is not appropriate for the level of risk. In these cases, the application of safety systems is largely inconsistent and is influenced by the expe-rience of the review team. In this paper, the use of a modified checklist for onshore operations, based off of API RP 14C, is investigated and case studies are presented.



Sarah Thomas — Symbol Designs and Signal Words: Importance In Hazard Statements For Pro-cedures. Signal words and symbols are often used in hazard statements for procedures to convey safety information to workers. However, little is known about effective display methods for this do-main. Two studies were performed, one with a fo-cus on symbol design and another on signal words. For the symbol design, contents of the de-sign (i.e., hazard, consequence, and mitigation) were manipulated to determine any effect on par-ticipants’ performance of the mitigation methods. For signal words, workers were asked their inter-pretation of caution, warning, and notes, which were then coded to determine three main themes of the results. Results indicate that the content of the symbol design had no impact on participants’ performance of the mitigation step and few work-ers had the correct definitions for the signal words caution and warning. These results suggest the time spent by procedure writer’s determining which signal word is appropriate and what information to provide in hazard symbols is not being spent well and should be used differently

Matthew Straw — Demonstrating the effective-ness of non-metallic riser flange covers for divert-ing leaks and jet fires using computational fluid dy-namics. The current oil and gas industry market conditions put greater emphasis of finding cost-effective design solutions while maintaining the same emphasis on process safety. Riser flange covers potentially provide a weight-saving alterna-tive to fire walls between FPSO riser balconies and process modules, but that saving can only be realised if non-metallic materials are employed. Flanges represent the most probable leak point, and the covers are designed to entirely surround the flange and divert any leaks outboard and away from the process equipment. Therefore, any flange cover system has to be capable of resisting and diverting the flow from the largest credible leak.

Tom Spicer — Transient Large-Scale Chlorine Releases in the Jack Rabbit II Field Tests: Rainout Source Data Analysis from Video Records. Spon-sored by the Chemical Security Analysis Center

(CSAC) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Se-curity, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) of the U.S. Department of Defense, Transport Canada, and Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC), the Jack Rabbit II tests were designed to release liquid chlorine at ambient temperature in quantities of 5 to 20 T for the purpose of quantifying the behavior and haz-ards of catastrophic chlorine releases at scales represented by rail and truck transport vessels. In 2015, five successful field trials were conducted in which chlorine was released in quantities of 5 to 10 tons through a 6-inch circular breach in the tank and directed vertically downward at 1 m elevation over a concrete pad. In 2016, three additional tri-als were conducted with releases of 10 tons also through 6-inch circular breaches at different re-lease orientations. A final 20 ton test was con-ducted in 2016. Data from the test program is be-ing made available. This paper summarizes an analysis of the available data from the concrete pad including analysis of the temperature meas-urements below and above grade in the concrete pad. Assessment of the chlorine rainout is esti-mated based on temperature measurements and available video data analysis.

Graham McVinnie — Improving Leak Detection in Deepwater Multiphase Systems. For Shell, oil spills invoke the worst images of our industry. No spill or leak is ever acceptable to us, and the measure of our resilience is how we learn and im-prove. Any leak reminds us that we can never be complacent when it comes to safety, and that our journey is never complete. We must sustain a sense of chronic unease every day and use what we learn from incidents to improve the safety of our operations. The focus of this presentation was Shell’s implementation of improved leak detection for multiphase (Oil and Gas) system which has historically presented a technical challenge to the industry. It discusses: a new Conditional Rate of Change (C-RoC) advanced algorithm for early de-tection of large leaks and the process require-ments (training, escalation, culture) to ensure a simple, reliable and sustainable leak detection ca-pability to minimize consequences for the long



term.

Raymond Freeman — Impact of the 70% Rule on Interlock Design. The IEC 61511 standard requires a verification calculation that a proposed design for a safety instrumented function (SIF) achieves the desired safety integrity level (SIL). The evaluation of the safety integrity level of a new or existing safety instrumented system requires detailed cal-culations based on the failure rates of the device and the planned maintenance -testing cycle for the system. In the design of a new safety interlock, the IEC 61508 and IEC 61511 standards require the use of the 70% failure rate estimate to evalu-ate the interlock design.

Qinglin Su — Resilience and risk analysis of fault-tolerant control design in continuous pharmaceuti-cal manufacturing. The effects of the paradigm shift from batch to continuous manufacturing on pharmaceutical industry, in terms of process safety and product quality (e.g., danger of dust explo-sions and risk of off-spec products, are of major concerns in the recent research progress in control system design. Specifically, a fault-tolerant control of critical process parameters (CPPs) and critical quality attributes (CQAs) is of paramount im-portance for the continuous operation with built-in safety and quality. In this study, a systematic framework for fault-tolerant control design, analy-sis, and evaluation for continuous pharmaceutical solid-dosage manufacturing is proposed, consist-ing of system identification, control design and analysis (controllability, stability, resilience, etc.), hierarchical three-layer control structures (model predictive control, state estimation, data reconcilia-tion, etc.), risk mapping, assessment and planning (Risk MAP) strategies, and control performance evaluation. The key idea of the proposed frame-work is to identify the potential risks in the control design, material variance, and process uncertain-ties, under which the control strategies are evalu-ated. The framework is applied to a continuous di-rect compaction process, specifically the feeding-blending system wherein the major source of vari-ance in the process operation and product quality arises. It can be demonstrated that the process operation failures and product quality variances in

the feeding-blending system can be mitigated and managed through the proposed systematic fault-tolerant control system design and risk analysis framework

Ranjana K. Mehta — Relationship between oper-ator situation awareness and physiological states during complex and critical offshore well control scenarios. Incident reviews of oil spill events (both large and small) suggest that human error, or more appropriately “systems error”, is a contributor to 50% of well control incidents (primarily kicks). The purpose of this study was to examine operator situation awareness (SA) and associated physio-logical load, using heart rate and heart rate varia-bility (HRV), during simulated offshore well control scenarios that differed in their complexity and criti-cality levels. Ten trained participants completed four scenarios (simple non-failure, simple failure, complex non-failure, and complex-failure) in an experimental session, lasting ~6 hours. Measures were obtained for each scenario, including speed and accuracy of the task performance, composite scores obtained from the Situational Awareness Rating Technique (SART), and operator heart rate and HRV measures. Greater errors were found in kick-related failure events, and complex scenarios were associated with longer reaction times. Partici-pants perceived lower SA levels during complex scenarios, and a trend was observed for lowest SA during complex failure scenarios. Finally, physio-logical responses did not differ for any of the four scenarios, however, a trend of increasing physio-logical ‘load” was observed with more complex and critical scenarios. High variability in participant covert and overt responses may increase the chal-lenges associated with classifying high-risk well control scenarios. It is critical that scenario plan-ners understand and recognize the variability in driller situation awareness and associated physio-logical load such scenario planners can then begin to start planning for alternative future scenarios.

Elaine Kleiner — Comparison between Kick Oc-currences in the Gulf of Mexico and Offshore Nor-way. Discussed were kick occurrences during off-shore operations in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) and in the Norwegian sector of North Sea. The com-



parison between these two geographic areas is feasible because of similarities in the regulatory regimes and reporting requirements. Various fac-tors, both natural and man-made, have been eval-uated in attempt to explain the elevated occurrenc-es of kicks in GOM. The information for this article is part of a recently completed BSEE- sponsored research project on kicks and loss of well control (LOWC) worldwide.

Shishir Gaikaiwari — Erosive Life Calculator for Production Choke Valves on Offshore Platforms to Prevent Catastrophic Failure. Production choke valves on offshore oil and gas production plat-forms are critical piece of equipment. If the choke valves are not operated and maintained properly, it can fail catastrophically due to erosion, posing high safety risk to personnel and equipment. Vari-ous safety systems are often utilized to make sure that there is no catastrophic failure. These sys-tems can be very complex and expensive.

Seyi Famuyiro — Use of Combustible Gas Detec-tors in Safety Instrumented Systems – A Practical Application Case Study. A risk assessment carried out on a chemical process identified a flammable liquid release as a potential hazard. A flammable liquid is used as a solvent in the process and is present in a dryer vessel during normal operations. The product from this vessel is a dry powder that is transferred to a packaging room directly below the vessel. Any leaks through the product dis-charge valve or inadvertent opening of the valve during the drying process or inadvertent opening/leak through of the flammable liquid feed valves during the discharge process could lead to flam-mable liquid release in the packaging room with potential for fire and explosion.

Neil Prophet — A Review of the 2012 Reynosa Gas Plant Explosion. On September 18, 2012, a major fire and explosion ripped through a gas plant in Reynosa, Mexico resulting in 31 fatalities and many injuries. The incident was caught on Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and has been viewed millions of times on social media sites such as YouTube. The video clip is particularly useful to process safety practitioners as it demonstrates the

various hazardous outcomes that can result from one individual loss of containment event. In the case of this incident, it is possible to see the initial pressure wave, followed by turbulent momentum jet dispersion, then a flash fire and jet fire, as well as shrapnel projectiles.

John Selby — Validation of safeguard protection from potential building explosion. It is common practice to take a full safeguard credit during Hazop or LOPA studies for gas detection in build-ings together with using either emergency building ventilation or operator response to an alarm. The basis of this assumption comes from the success-ful mitigation of a consequence with the use of combustible gas detector alarm and operator re-sponse as a safeguard. In most cases these events are from small leaks which do not result in a rapid accumulation of flammable gases. Typi-cally the gas detection alarms only warn opera-tions and/or initiate an increase in air flow from the building ventilation system but do not automatical-ly shut down and isolate the process. The normal design is to follow API RP 505 for enclosed areas, with standard building ventilation rates at approxi-mately 6 air volume changes per hour to prevent accumulation of flammables as a result of fugitive emission in the building and an emergency 12 air volume changes per hour when gas detection is reaching 10 to 25% of lower explosion limit (LEL). It is not common practice to use gas detection to directly trip the operating plant because of the concern with nuisance gas detection alarms inter-rupting production.

Hui-Ning Yang — Analysis of Leak and Explosion from an Underground Pipeline in Kaohsiung, Tai-wan. On 23:57 July 31st, 2014, a catastrophic va-por explosion occurred in the downtown of Kaohsiung city. The incident was initiated from a leak of an underground pipeline transporting pres-surized propylene liquid. Analysis of pipeline oper-ation logs and pipeline break release modeling suggested that at least 90,000 kg of propylene leaked, entered the underground trench and spread 4.5 km in distance before meeting an igni-tion source three hours later. The ignition caused a significant confined vapor explosion which blew out the road above the underground trench, dam-



aged more than one hundred vehicles on the road with thirty two fatalities and more than three hun-dred injuries.

Sonny Sachdeva — Establishing a Safety Perfor-mance System for Pipeline Integrity. Pipeline inci-dents recorded by Pipeline and Hazardous Materi-als Safety Administration (PHMSA), from 1994 through 2013, the U.S. had 745 serious incidents with gas distribution, causing 278 fatalities and 1059 injuries, with $110,658,083 in property dam-age with additional 41 fatalities from gas transmis-sion incidents and 363 fatalities from incidents with gas all system type. Similar pipeline incidents have occurred around the world. This has brought the importance of establishing a good monitoring and evaluation program for maintaining the integrity of the gas and liquid pipelines. Establishment of a safety performance evaluation system is important for understanding the current state of the process safety management system, identifying gaps and striving for continuous improvement based on the plan, do, check and act approach. In this paper, the authors discuss various meaningful perfor-mance metrics vital to integrity management based on relevant API, ANSI, ASME, Canadian, and U.K. HSE standards. It discusses how to se-lect of key indicators including both leading and lagging indicators and the characteristics of ma-ture indicator program. The leading or lagging in-dicator (whether process safety or personal safety) should relate directly to a particular engineering control that is in place to prevent a hazardous event from occurring or to mitigate the conse-quences of a hazardous event. Some indicators may be a requirement by regulator, however, for continuous and holistic improvement, indicators related to pertinent challenges to integrity of pipe-lines such as corrosion, third party damage, under/over pressure, integrity inspections, transportation and construction damage and human error should be structured into the performance evaluation pro-gram.

Hongfei Xu — Oil Transportation in Pipelines with the Existence of Ice. When the ambient tempera-ture is below freezing point, ice may form in the oil transportation pipelines, which can cause flow as-

surance issues, such as restricting flow path or even plugging the pipeline. Ice plugging was re-ported to delay the restart of the Poplar pipeline system gathering crude oil from Montana and North Dakota. [1] Ice may also pose threats to the Trans-Alyeska Pipeline System (TAPS). The de-clining throughput makes the oil get colder much faster. If oil temperature falls below the freezing point, ice forms and leads to flow assurance is-sues, such as coating critical valves, accumulating in the pipeline, and restricting flow.

Chuntak Phark — Prediction on Emergency Evacuation Orders Using Naïve Bayes Classifica-tion and Deep Learning. Emergency response to chemical accidents is proceeded in order of pre-vention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. One of the methods of response is emergency evacuation orders. In order to minimize the loss of life, it is important to issue prompt and precise evacuation orders when chemical acci-dents such as toxic gas emissions occur near pop-ulated areas.

Eric Steinhauser — Addressing the Challenges of Implementing Safety Instrumented Systems in Multi-Product Batch Processes. Adapting the re-quirements of IEC 61511 to a batch system can be frustrating, particularly for multi-product units. While a Safety Instrumented System (SIS) for con-tinuous operation is often a straightforward detect-decide-act loop, implementing a SIS for a batch system may involve multiple safety functions, time- or state-dependence, intricate calculations, or complex installations. Relationships between the SIS elements and the basic process control sys-tem (BPCS) must be tightly managed, providing both for the safety of the unit and its ability to oper-ate without spurious trips or other hindrances. These issues are further complicated when multi-ple products requiring different functions or set-points are produced in the same SIS-protected batch unit.

Prasad Goteti — How and When Do I Validate, Proof Test and Re-Validate My SIS logic Solver? A major component of every Safety Instrumented System (SIS) is the Logic Solver. It plays an im-portant role as it is the sub-system which performs



the logic in every Safety Instrumented Function (SIF). But sometimes there is confusion as to what constitutes: validation of the SIS logic solver, Proof Test of the SIS logic solver, and Re-Validation of the Logic Solver. This work will attempt to clarify the above with an explanation based on IEC 61508, 61511 (ISA84.00.01). It will answer the questions “When and How” for each of the activi-ties listed.

Changwon Son — Conceptualizing Multiagency Emergency Management System as Joint Cogni-tive System. Emergency management system (EMS) provides a crucial barrier for the protection of socio-ecological infrastructure from man-made disasters and natural threats. To meet diverse de-mands from hazardous events, resilience engi-neering is considered as an effective approach to enhance the performance of EMS. While concep-tual and qualitative descriptions of resilience are abundant, ideas of operationalizing resilience are scarce. In this regard, the present work redefines resilience in the EMS and proposes a framework of measuring resilience by abstracting the EMS as a joint cognitive system.

Elliott P. Lander — State of Procedures in High Risk, Highly Regulated Processing Industries. The general state of procedures in the highly regulated, high risk industries is poor. Most companies con-tinue to use “Typewriter Technology,” such as MS Word to create procedures and manage them through standard document management systems such as SharePoint, OpenText or Documentum.

James Wendelken — Capturing What’s in Peo-ple’s Heads to Learn from Successes and Failures and Provide Effective Ways Forward. In industry, much can be gained by drawing from different people’s experiences and what they have learned or can collectively learn from successes as well as failures. However, capturing and utilizing this knowledge is often challenging in many areas such as product development, testing, and opera-tions, particularly due to the following circumstanc-es: new information is continually being generated, many employees are specialized, much infor-mation is sought out for specific situations, there are many different circumstances and ways to uti-

lize information and resources, and not all valuable information can be captured in employee/training programs.

Dave Grattan — Human Factors Methods. The Process Industry has an established practice of identifying barriers to credit as IPLs (Independent protection layers) through the use of methods such as PHA (Process Hazard Analysis) and LOPA (Layer of Protection Analysis) type studies. How-ever, the validation of IPLs and barriers to ensure their effectiveness especially related to human and organization factors is lagging.

Pratik Krishnan — Modeling the blanketing and warming effect of high expansion foam used for LNG vapor risk mitigation. Natural Gas is a cleaner energy when compared to other sources like oil or coal. Its consumption has been drastically increas-ing over the past few years and is projected to in-crease further. Liquefying natural gas is an effec-tive way of easily storing and transporting it be-cause of the high ratio of liquid to vapor densities. However, a leak of liquefied natural gas (LNG) can result in the formation of a huge vapor cloud, which poses a potential risk. This cryogenic vapor cloud has the potential to ignite and can migrate downwind near ground level because of a density greater than air. NFPA recommends the use of high expansion foam to mitigate the vapor hazard due to LNG. The primary objective of this work is to study the effects of heat transfer mechanisms like convection and radiation on foam breakage to be able to accurately quantify the amount of foam required to mitigate the vapor risk of LNG spills.

Jeffrey Marx — Forthcoming Changes in the CSA Z276 LNG Standard. The LNG standard published by the Canadian Standards Association, CSA Z276, Liquefied natural gas (LNG) — Production, storage, and handling was last published in 2015. This standard is primarily adopted by Canadian provinces for application to existing and proposed LNG facilities in Canada, but is also referenced in other areas of the world. The standard is similar to National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) stand-ard 59A that is prevalent in the U.S. Z276 covers the location and siting, equipment selection, con-struction techniques, and fire protection require-



ments, as well as operations, maintenance, and personnel training guidelines for LNG facilities.

Edna Mendez — Study of the Effects of Flow Conditions on the Performance of Corrosion inhibi-tors under CO2 Environment. Major process safety incidents have been caused by corrosion all over the world. These incidents are usually related to loss of containment of highly flammable liquids or gases, causing severe damages to the environ-ment, impacts on people and monetary losses. Despite the increasing knowledge in corrosion, ef-forts are still needed to understand different dam-age mechanisms and their control methods. This work focuses on the study of different flow param-eters such as flow velocity in a brine solution satu-rated with CO2 in presence of a non-toxic corro-sion inhibitor. The tests will be performed using a rotating cylinder electrode which is a well-defined apparatus to study changes in hydrodynamic con-ditions in a pipe. Electrochemical techniques such as Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) coupled with surface images will be used to under-stand the behavior of the inhibitor under different flow velocities. The objective is to enhance the fundamental understanding of the damage mecha-nisms present in the in downstream processes of oil and gas industry. The experimental results from this work would allow developing a model describ-ing the corrosion behavior.

Zubin Kumana — Time Dependent Effects of Ex-ternal Fire on Chemical Reactive Hazards. An ex-ternal fire can often be the defining case when siz-ing a relief device for chemical reactive hazards. Batch reaction systems can have multiple reac-tions or have reactions with multiple steps. Ana-lyzing every possibility is impractical, so relief de-vice sizing is often performed by conducting only one test or simulation per scenario. However, this simplification can obscure potentially significant effects which might then be overlooked in the anal-ysis. For example, a fire that is started while the main reaction is underway could result in an over-pressure (due to an exotherm or decomposition reaction) less severe than one that starts once the final product has completely formed. This can be due to reactants for the main reaction being boiled

off before the conditions for the worse case are reached. Other factors that should likewise be considered when performing transient analysis for external fire on reactive systems.

Zhe Han — Prediction of NH4NO3 thermal de-composition parameters in the presence of two ad-ditives using the single additive experimental val-ues. NH4NO3 thermal decomposition rate is signif-icantly affected by the presence of additives such as Na2SO4 (an inhibitor) or KCl (a promoter). The presence of Na2SO4 increases substantially the decomposition “onset” temperature of NH4NO3; K2CO3 does the same, while KCl reduces the same parameter. In this work the effect of individ-ual additives on characteristic thermal decomposi-tion parameters of NH4NO3 have been correlated and used to predict the respective parameters when two additives are present simultaneously. A simple model predicting the effect of mixtures of additives on the “onset” temperature and the tem-perature rise due to the thermal decomposition of AN, using the same data from the individual com-pounds was developed. The results showed that the behavior of each compound is independent from that of the others. The model predicts well To and Tf of such mixtures of additives.

Steven Betteridge — Modelling large LNG pool fires on water. There has been a rising demand for natural gas across the World. In many countries, this demand is being satisfied through an increas-ing number of marine LNG Carrier (LNGC) deliver-ies and hence there is a safety requirement to un-derstand the consequences of significant acci-dents that could lead to the catastrophic failure re-sulting in a large spill of LNG in a harbor. The im-pact of thermal radiation on LNGCs, terminal facili-ties and the public outside the site fence-line from an LNG pool fire on water could extend a long dis-tance according to current empirical models. The Phoenix pool fire experiments were conducted by Sandia laboratories to validate these models for large LNG spills on water. It was observed that the pool fire did not extend across the entire area of an 80 m diameter LNG pool. In addition, the flame height was greater than expected and there was very little smoke obscuration compared to the 35



m tests at Montoir. This combination of physical phenomena made it difficult to use existing models to predict the consequences of thermal radiation, especially when extrapolating to different and po-tentially larger spill sizes.

Maged Ismail — Ignition CFD Modeling of LNG Flammable Vapor Cloud Dispersion. The simula-tion of LNG flammable vapor cloud dispersion plays a key role in the safe design of LNG termi-nals and other facilities. With large scale and often complex release scenarios, the scope for model testing is limited and so computational fluid dy-namics (CFD) offers a valuable predictive tool, particularly where uneven terrain or obstructions are present and simpler simulation methods may be insufficient.

Wimberly Dick — FlameIdentification and local impact analysis of projectile hazard in the LNG in-dustry. With a strong growth in natural gas produc-tion in the United States, a number of liquefied nat-ural gas (LNG) facilities have been proposed and authorized. These LNG facilities have sufficient safety, security, risk assessment and mitigation plans developed in close coordination with the lo-cal, state, and federal authorities. However, to continue to ensure safer operations, it is vital to continue to improve the scope of risk assessment strategies. Recent incidents have highlighted the need to consider the potential hazard and risk from projectiles. The main objectives of this study were to- determine projectile parameters such as source, type, and characteristics (mass, diameter, velocity) and conduct a local impact analysis for identified potential projectile hazard scenarios. The work concludes that the five different calculated thicknesses for concrete penetration, concrete scabbing, concrete perforation, and steel penetra-tion and perforation depend directly on the kinetic energy and diameter of the projectile. Further-more, it is recommend that operators conduct a projectile hazard analyses for LNG facility projects, which would be useful in making recommenda-tions for the thickness and type of storage tanks and other equipment, and for other appropriate mitigation measures.

John B. Cornwell — What API RP 752 Does Not

Tell You – But People Will Ask. Over the past sev-eral years, Quest Consultants Inc. has conducted building siting studies per API RP 752 for a range of facilities in the United States and abroad. This work summarizes several of the issues encoun-tered when applying the guidance provided by API RP 752.

Guohua Chen — Dynamic Response of Vertical Tank Impacted by Blast Fragments in Chemical Industrial Parks. The adjacent vessels may be im-pacted and/or destroyed by blast fragments in chemical industrial parks or plants, which could lead to the domino effects. Based on the analysis of common parameters of blast fragments includ-ing the shape, quantity, mass, and impact velocity, the numerical model of vertical storage tanks im-pacted by blast fragments was developed with LS-DYNA. Considering deformation of the fragment itself, the law of the dynamic response of vertical tank was described quantitatively. The results showed that there were 3 collisions during the im-pact process, the maximum plastic deformation occurred at the impact center, the plastic strain was mainly distributed in the range from the im-pact center to the tank bottom, and there were 4 plastic hinge lines in the deformation region. There was linear relationship between the residual dis-placement of impact center and the impact velocity of the fragment, and the tank wall had entered plastic deformation stage. With the horizontal im-pact angle in the range from 15° to 30°, the plastic deformation energy of the tank increased with the horizontal impact angle evidently; with the horizon-tal impact angle in the range from 30° to 35°, the impact mode of the fragment was changed from penetrating the tank wall to sliding along the tank wall; with the horizontal impact angle in the range from 35° to 60°, the deformation energy of the tank decreased linearly with horizontal impact angle, and the influence of vertical impact angle on the deformation energy of the tank was greatly re-duced.

James Wesevich — Improved Blast Capacity of Pre-engineered Metal Buildings using Coupled CFD and FEA Modeling. The initial CCPS guide-line [CCPS, 1996] for estimating lethality for build-



ing occupants within petrochemical buildings sub-jected to blast hazards was based on building construction type and peak overpressure. This method allows for a quick screening of building occupant vulnerability but does not include the effects of the duration of the blast that the build-ings are subjected to. Blast hazards within petro-chemical facilities include vapor cloud explosions (VCE), BLEVEs, and bursting pressure vessels. VCE’s include both deflagrations having long blast durations and detonations having much shorter durations. Bursting pressure vessels can also be characterized as having relatively short durations. Therefore, the latest CCPS guideline [CCPS, 2012] removed this singular peak over-pressure methodology and provided occupant vulnerability as a function of building damage and construction type as a function of peak overpres-sure and duration. Unfortunately, this improved method on blast characterization did not provide a way to correlate blast loading with building dam-age.

Diego Sierra Arcila — Bacterial-foraging optimi-zation algorithm for non-hazardous plant layouts. The following presentation approaches a safe plant layout design problem based on a bacterial-foraging optimization algorithm. The approach finds the position in the two dimensional plane for each main process unit and evaluates the possi-bility of secondary contention for pertinent units, in order to minimize capital costs associated to equipment loss, piping, secondary contention, and usage of area. Fire and Explosion hazard is considered as the relevant safety aspect for distri-bution, and it is assessed through Dow’s Fire and Explosion Index. The proposed solution approach provides an alternative to hard-optimization meth-ods, by allowing greater flexibility in accounting for both safety and economic aspects, while providing high quality solutions in a limited com-putation time. The aim of our proposed solution approach is to provide support to expert decision-making during the early plant layout design steps. A case study based on an acrylic-acid production plant, which has been used by several other pa-pers that appeared in the literature, serves the

purposes of showing the appropriateness and ef-fectiveness of the method.

Rubí García-Velázquez — A Strategy Based on Aspen Plus for Venting and Leaks from Vessels. Severe accidents have occurred when vessels release their contained material either accidental-ly or intentionally to prevent further catastrophic accidents. Several models have been developed to deal with simulating these events where rigor-ous thermodynamic procedures are used to im-prove the estimation. The approach developed in this work takes advantage of the commercial soft-ware Aspen Plus to estimate all required thermo-dynamic properties including estimation of sonic releases. The procedure is developed in the Ex-cel environment where the strategy is pro-grammed to call and run an Aspen Plus file, while keeping control on the integration to solve a qua-si-steady-state model. The simple Euler method is applied to solve the dynamic release model. Physical characteristics of the vessel can easily be incorporated to detect the releasing phase. The releasing behavior is modelled with the inter-nal models for valves include in Aspen Plus, where sonic estimation is already implemented. Estimation takes advantage of the simulation package and results are in good agreement with experimental data reported in the literature.



Saiful Islam, Vice Chancellor, BUET

Ijaz Hossain, Chemical Engineering Department

Head, BUET

Kenneth Mogensen and Jacob Petz, Maersk

Byung-Chol Ma and students, Chonnam National

University

Dr. Khaliqur Rahman

Dr. Milosh Puchovsky, WPI

Dr. Hans Pasman, Research Professor

Dr. Maria Papadaki, University of Patras

Delphine Laboureur, Von Karman Institute

Outreach

Outreach Activities August 17, 2017 Chemical Processing Webinar Failure to Learn September 19, 2017 Purdue University Graduate Seminar Series The Evolution of Process Safety and the Need for Curriculum Changes West Lafayette, IN October 1-5, 2017 10th World Congress of Chemical Engineering Barcelona, Spain A Journey to Excellence in Process Safety Manage-

ment A Resilience Based Approach—Corporate Layer Analy-

sis Process Safety Lost in Silos: A Case Study of HDPE

Silo Explosion in Yeosu, Korea In Search of Causes behind Offshore Oil and Gas Rig

Fires Can we make the use of the methodological common-

ality in accident investigation and hazard identification to enhance process safety?

October 11, 2017 SOCMA Keynote Speaker Houston, TX

October 12, 2017 SOCMA Risk Vs. Hazard: Effective Communication Tools for Stakeholder Groups Houston, TX October 29, 2017 8th International Conference on Science and Fire Pro-tection Engineering A Synergistic Approach for Fire Protection and Pro-cess Safety Engineering to Improve Safety Perfor-mance Nanjing, China November 10, 2017 Gold Triangle Business Roundtable Lessons Learned from Natural Disasters Beaumont, TX December 11, 2017 TEES Turbomachinery Laboratory Role of Mechanical Integrity Program in Design, Instal-lation and Operation of Turbomachinery and Pumps December 20-23, 2017 BUET International Conference on Chemical Engineer-ing

August

September

October

November

Visitors

Upcoming Webinars February 8, 2018

Process Safety Series: Safe Work Practices

April 12, 2018

Process Safety Series: Management of Change

June 14, 2018

Process Safety Series: Impact of Facility Siting on

Preventing Incidents

August 16, 2018

Process Safety Series: Implementation Challenges for

Inherently Safer Technologies

October 11, 2018

Process Safety Series: Dust Explosions


Classes start January 16

SENG 455/655: Process Safety Engineering Required for PSPC/42 PDHs Applications of engineering principles to process safety and hazards analysis, mitigation, and prevention, with

special emphasis on the chemical process industries; includes source modeling for leakage rates, dispersion,

analysis, relief valve sizing, fire and explosion damage analysis, hazards identification, risk analysis, accident

investigations.

SENG 460/660: Quantitative Risk Analysis in Safety Engineering Required for PSPC/42 PDHs

Following the growth in complexity of engineering systems, demands are increasing for health, safety, and

environmental quality with more stringent requirements for reliability and increased engineering performance.

This course presents the fundamentals of quantitative risk analysis for cost-effective engineering applications,

risk criteria, and risk decisions.

SENG 312/674: System Safety Engineering 42 PDHs

Application of system safety analytical techniques to the design process, emphasis on the management of a

system safety or product safety program, relationship with other disciplines, such as reliability,

maintainability, human factors, and product liability applications.

SENG 422/677: Fire Protection Engineering 42 PDHs

Fire Protection design concepts and considerations for chemical, petrochemical, and hydrocarbon processing

facilities. Special attention given to fire hazard analysis, fire risk assessment, fire protection features, and

emergency response. Specific Fire Protection design considerations are studied for the various types of

facilities and processes.

Process Safety Practice Certificate

The Process Safety Practice Certificate (PSPC) created for industry engineers who want a more in-depth study

of process safety in chemical engineering. This certification requires completion of 125 Professional

Development Hours (PDHs) within a three year timeframe. The program has two required courses totaling 84

PDHs. The remaining hours may be obtained through courses offered at training facilities in Houston, other

distance learning course offerings, and through the Center’s Annual International Symposium in College

Station, Texas.

The application and list of classes are available on our website. Upon completion of the program

requirements, participants will be issued a certificate of completion.

Safety Engineering Courses — Spring 2018

http://psc.tamu.edu/education/process-safety-practice


Hazards 28

Risk will never be eliminated, but it can be better managed and reduced

Our Hazards conferences share best practice, latest developments and lessons learned in process safety, promoting a continuous focus on improving process safety performance. Covering every major aspect of process safety, and aimed at anyone who is active in process safety and risk management, they provide essential insight into how to manage and reduce risk effectively and offer excellent networking opportunities. First staged in 1960, Hazards is held annually in the UK and is widely recognised as Europe’s leading process safety event. Sister conferences are held regularly in Australasia and Asia too. Hazards 28 takes place on 15–17 May 2018 at the EICC in Edinburgh, Scotland, and will bring together process safety practitioners from around the globe.

Key features

approximately 100 oral presentations and posters from leading industry practitioners, researchers and regulators

invited keynote speakers from industry trade exhibition of process safety related products and services excellent networking opportunities optional pre-conference workshops


© Copyright 2017. Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center. All rights reserved.

College Station, Texas, USA. November 2016

Contact Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center

3122 TAMU College Station, TX 77843-3122

Phone: 979-845-3489

Fax: 979-458-1493

http://psc.tamu.edu

For more info: http://psc.tamu.edu/education/continuing-education

Symposia January 23-25, 2018

73rd Annual Instrumentation and Automation Symposium for the Process Industries Memorial Student Center

Texas A&M University College Station, Texas

• • •

October 23-25, 2018 Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center

21st Annual International Symposium Beyond Regulatory Compliance, Making Safety Second Nature

In Association with IChemE

Hilton Conference Center College Station, Texas

Calendar of Events

Short Courses

3102 — Pressure Relief Systems—Best Practices Date: February 21-22, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: 1.4 CEUS/14 PDHs Instructor: Dr. Nancy Faulk

2073 – SIS Implementation Date: March 20 – 22, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: 2.1 CEUs/21 PDHs Instructor: Mr. Bill Hearn

3151 — Disposal Systems Analysis—Best Practices Date: February 23, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: .7 CEUS/7 PDHs Instructor: Dr. Ben Pratt

1082 - Process Safety Management-Fundamentals Date: April 3-4, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: 1.4 CEUs/14 PDHs Instructor: Mr. John Lockwood

2052 – Process Hazard Analysis Leadership Training Date: March 7-8, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: 1.4 CEUs/14 PDHs Instructor: Mr. Watson Dupont

2042 - Layer of Protection Analysis Date: April 10-11, 2018 Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm Credit: 1.4 CEUs/14 PDHs Instructor: Mr. Bill Hearn

http://psc.tamu.edu/

http://psc.tamu.edu/education/continuing-education

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