Abstract:
To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, the Safety Centre @ Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) organized the International Conference on Safety (ICS) in 2014. Jointly organized with ICS were the Workshop on Process Safety Educations by Prof. Daniel A. Crowl, Symposium on Process Safety and a Short Course on Design and Safety of structures under fire. Participants in ICS 2014 included researchers, educators, students, safety officials, engineers, safety advocates, policymakers, and consultants from over 20. The conference sought to answer the question “Have we really made progress since Bhopal?” A variety of viewpoints were presented approaching the question from various aspects of safety including – regulations and standards, design and operations, risk management, planning and economics, testing, and behavioral and workplace safety. Based on feedback from the program committee, session chairs, and other delegates a small number of the over 50 process safety related papers presented in the conference were invited to submit an extended version of their paper. This special issue contains eight of these papers. The first two papers describe the Korean experience in improving process safety at the national level. Kwon and coworkers present the implementation of Process Safety Management regulations in Korea beginning from 1996 and the many benefits from this amendment to the Industrial Safety and Health Act. Continuing the same theme, Lee and coworkers describe how the Korean government has reorganized its policies for proactive action and the formation of a Chemical Emergency Preparedness Center. They also discuss the role of private enterprise in developing the safety culture in Korea. Sengupta at al. describe the implementation of land use and zoning restrictions for hazardous chemical plants in India. They apply a GIS based classical quantitative risk assessment method to map cumulative risk levels arising from a number of hazardous installations in the petrochemical cluster at Haldia. Their study highlights challenges in determining risk maps. The next two papers look at the human factors that are today recognized to be the key determinants of safety performance. Warszawska and Krasławski address the role of safety culture within the organization and stress the importance of continuous evaluation and improvement. They introduce the idea of Assessment Tree Method (ATM) for quantitative estimation of the level of safety culture in an organization. The proposed method is based on guided interviews; hence it provides deep insight and helps identify the weaker elements of safety culture in the organization. The method is illustrated with a case study of a University. Kodappully et al. propose a proactive approach to minimizing human error by control room operators based on cognitive engineering. They demonstrate that eye tracking provides a direct measurement of the cognitive tasks performed by the operator while managing process abnormalities. Their results from a simulated case study show that technique can identify incipient cognitive failures. Inherent Safer technologies seek to eliminate and minimize the underlying hazard in a process rather than manage its risks through add-on safety measures. It is best applied in the earliest stages of the plant lifecycle. Ahmed et al. present a graphical technique for inherent safety assessment that can be applied during the R&D stages of process design. When multiple pathways exist to produce a chemical, their technique can help to identify the most hazardous, and the least hazardous process routes. A case study of manufacture of methyl methacrylate is used to illustrate the key ideas of their technique. Kidam et al. propose the use of accident databases such as that from the US Chemical Safety Board and the Japanese Failure Knowledge Database to review process plant designs. Their analysis reveals that design errors occur across the various design phases and are broadly distributed across various equipment types. The paper therefore develops customized inherent safety design review criteria and the keywords that are most potent for each design phase. Finally, Gopalaswami and co-workers study the consequences of LNG spill in water. Since turbulence plays a key role in the source term modeling, they study boiling induced turbulence of cryogenic liquid in water experimentally through high-speed flow visualization. Their experiment shows that initial water temperature and height of cryogenic liquid have a strong influence on the turbulence parameters.