Publications - SIS-TECH

Incidents That Define Safe Automation

The process safety management regulation was issued in 1992 to address the prevention or minimization of the consequences of catastrophic releases of toxic, reactive, flammable, or explosive chemicals. In the decade leading up to its promulgation, the process industry suffered significant loss events that caused worldwide attention to become focused on reducing the risk of process safety events. To emphasize the importance of safe automation, case studies of previous incidents are presented, including a brief description of the incident and the major lessons to be learned. There are typically many contributors to these incidents and some incidents have become synonymous with certain safety issues, e.g., Texas City 2005 related to siting of temporary and permanent structures. This paper does not make any attempt to replicate these previous lessons learned, but instead focuses on the contribution of inadequate design, installation, testing, maintenance, and operation of the process control and safety systems.

Are Your Safeguards Fast Enough To Be Effective?

Presented at AIChE 2017 Spring Meeting, and Global Congress on Process Safety 2017.
A core attribute of all safeguards is that they must be functional against the loss event in question and one of the essential elements of functionality is speed. How to determine the response time available for a given safeguard to complete its action is a common project question. Several instrumentation and controls design pitfalls should be avoided when specifying the response time. A variety of engineering practices, from basic to advanced, may be used to justify the selected value.

Introduction to Functional Safety Assessment of SCAI

A functional safety assessment (FSA) is a tool used to identify and correct defects before a simple human error allows an incident to propagate in spite of the capital spent on the installed SCAI equipment.
Presented at ISA 2016, MKPOSC International Symposium 2016, Global Congress on Process Safety, 2017. Accepted for publication in Process Safety Progress.