Process Safety

Process safety: Is safety common sense?

n the last couple of years, the United States Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has recognized the importance of increasing the role of process safety, and safety in general, in the education of chemists and chemical engineers. In the CSB report1 on the December 2007 T2 Laboratories, Inc. reactive chemical explosion in Jacksonville, FL, the CSB recommended that the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, Inc. (ABET) work together to incorporate reactive hazard awareness in undergraduate chemical engineering curricula requirements. In response to this recommendation, the AIChE Education and Accreditation Committee went beyond consideration of reactive hazards only, and proposed new requirements for process safety in the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum, including demonstration that graduates have sufcient knowledge to address the hazards associated with chemical and/or biological processes. These requirements are expected to be effective starting with accreditation actions during the 20122013 academic year. In October 2011, the CSB issued a report and on a January 2010 laboratory explosion at Texas Tech University.2 The report identied a number of issues in safety management in the academic laboratory environment, including the lack of:  consideration of physical hazards in laboratory safety management plans  hazard evaluation procedures  laboratory hazard management guidance  procedures and training  incident and near miss reporting and tracking The CSB specically recommended that ACS develop good practice guidance that identies and describes methodologies to assess and control hazards that can be used successfully in a research laboratory.
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I think that the CSBs attention the importance of safety and process safety in the education of chemistry and chemical engineering students will be very positive in the long term. The key to long term excellent safety performance in all chemical laboratories and process facilities is the safety attitude and culture of the people who operate and manage those facilities. A good safety attitude and culture is best developed early in a professionals career, and it should start early in the students education. I have heard stories about some resistance in the academic community from colleagues in universities, and this may be an issue in effective implementation of new safety curriculum requirements and laboratory procedures. For example, a colleague heard somebody describe increased emphasis on safety in the curriculum as not needed because safety was just common sense. That got me to thinking about whether or not safety really is common sense or not. Perhaps it is true for some general personal safety areas, such as the dangers of working at heights, some electrical hazards, slips and falls, and other things which are common hazards in everyday life. Of course, even for these situations we need education and reminders about hazard recognition and avoiding complacency in dealing with those hazards. Recognition of the hazard is only the rst step, and it isnt necessarily common sense to know what to do to manage the hazard and what represents safe practice concerning the hazard. I do not believe that many process and chemical hazards are common sense at all for many chemists and chemical engineers. Here are a few examples:  Runaway reactions: The hazard of a runaway reaction is clear to many process safety experts, but perhaps not to many chemists and chemical engineers. They really need some education to understand the potential for uncontrolled reaction because of the inability to remove heat from a reaction as fast as it is generated, and the potential for different, and potentially more hazardous, reactions at the resulting elevated temperature.  Reactive and unstable chemical structures: Most chemists will recognize potentially reactive and unstable chemical structures double

http://www.csb.gov/investigations/detail. aspx?SID=8&Type=2 &p g = 1& F _ A l l = y, September 2009. 2 http://www.csb.gov/newsroom/detail.aspx? nid=386, October 19, 2011.

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and triple bonds, strained rings, reactive chemical groups such as nitro groups, etc. But how about most chemical engineers with a couple of semesters of organic chemistry which is not likely to have focused on things like thermal stability of materials? Several years ago in a nal project presentation for a senior chemical engineering design class, a student group described their design for a plant which manufactured a nitrated compound. The product was distilled, and in the question session I asked if they knew if the bottom material in their product distillation column was thermally stable at the operating temperature. They answered that they assumed that it was stable. Wrong answer! You should assume that it is not stable especially if the material has nitro in its name. Insist on data to conrm that it is safe to operate at the design temperature.  Hazards of scaleup: Chemical engineers will have an appreciation of the impact of increasing the size of process equipment, particularly issues related to mixing and the decreased surface area for heat removal relative to vessel volume as the size of equipment increases. This can even be a signicant issue in laboratory size equipment a reaction might behave very differently on a 1 l scale compared to 50 ml. Many chemists may not be aware of the potential hazards of scaleup. Many years ago I worked with a new process development chemist who told me that throughout his academic career through his PhD, he always worked with quantities of material that were so small that he could barely see them. Now he had to think about what happens in a 10,000 gallon vessel, and there were a lot of important issues that he never had to think about before.  Emergency pressure relief: Most engineers and chemists would recognize the importance of pressure relief devices in a system which

could generate hazardous pressure. But do they understand how to determine the appropriate size for the relief devices, and do they think about making sure the relieved material goes to a safe place? I once participated in an investigation of a laboratory incident in a high pressure synthesis reaction apparatus. Relief valves had been provided, but the design basis for the sizing was not clear, and the apparatus exploded because the relief valves were not big enough for the excursion which occurred. You dont get part credit in safety it isnt good enough to recognize that you need a relief valve. The relief valve has to be big enough, open at the right pressure, and the discharged material must go to a safe place.  The re triangle: Sure, we all learned about this in kindergarten when the local reman visited. But think about all of the details that go into understanding the re triangle ammable limits, limiting oxygen concentration, minimum ignition energy, etc. To extend the re triangle to explosions, you need to introduce connement and consider the impact of obstacles and terrain for unconned outdoor ammable vapor clouds. For dust explosions, you need to suspend the fuel in air as well, so you wind up with a dust explosion pentagon.  Dust explosion hazards: Speaking of dust explosions, is sugar a hazardous material? Well, the powdered sugar on the cream lled donut that you probably shouldnt be eating for breakfast can be quite dangerous, and not just because being overweight is bad for your health! If the sugar dust is conned in an enclosure, dispersed in air at a sufciently high concentration, and ignited, it can explode. That is what happened in a sugar renery in Port Wentworth, GA, on February 7, 2008, and the explosion killed 14 people, injured 38, and destroyed a

large portion of the facility.3 This incident is comparable in impact to the March 2005 Texas City, TX oil renery explosion.4 It is common sense to most people that there are signicant explosion hazards in an oil renery, but how about a sugar renery? It is surprising how many chemists and chemical engineers are unaware of the potential hazards of combustible dusts.  Value of personal experience: We usually base our judgment of the risk of an activity on our personal experience. If we do something routinely, and nothing goes wrong, nobody gets hurt; we are inclined to believe that activity is safe. That is common sense our experience is that nothing bad has happened, so we assume that we are doing the activity safely. We need some education to understand how high societys expectations are for safety, particularly when hazardous materials are involved. Our personal experience in a few thousand work hours is not statistically relevant when actual performance of the process industries is in the range of a few fatalities in hundreds of millions of exposure hours. There are many other examples. Of course, another reason why safety education is important is that even if safety is common sense, it has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense.5 However, safety is not really common sense in many cases, and recognition of hazards, particularly process and other technology hazards, requires education. Remember that common sense is that which tells us the world is at.6

http://www.csb.gov/investigations/ detail.aspx?SID=6&Type=2&pg=1& F_All=y, November 22, 2010. 4 http://www.csb.gov/investigations/ detail.aspx?SID=20&Type=2&pg=1& F_All=y, March 20, 2007. 5 Thomas Chalmers in Natural Theology (1836). 6 Stuart Chase, quoted in S. I. Hayakawas Language in Thought and Action (1952).

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Journal of Chemical Health & Safety, January/February 2012