Safety in Design

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction

A concept developed for the chemical industry can also be applied to other fields. This concept is called intrinsic continuous process safeguarding and is discussed in Section 1.2. It is related to the concept of inherently safer design. How the application of the concepts of inherently safer design and intrinsic continuous process safeguarding could have prevented three serious accidents in the chemical industry or mitigated its effects is briefly indicated in Sections 1.3–1.5. Section 1.6 contains concluding remarks.

1.2 Intrinsic Continuous Process Safeguarding

The danger of explosions, evolution of toxic gases, etc., comes with the large‐scale manufacture of certain chemicals. The prevention or control of undesirable reactions in processes is discussed in a paper [1]. The aim of intrinsic continuous process safeguarding is to obtain stable reaction systems that, within very wide limits, are not endangered by human errors or equipment failures. The approach has shown its merits at the manufacture of organic peroxides. It is related to the concept of inherently safer design [2]. Intrinsic continuous process safeguarding is compared to extrinsic process safeguarding in the paper mentioned earlier [1]. The latter safeguarding starts working upon a signal. Extrinsic process safeguarding is appropriate only as complementary and secondary protection: As complementary safeguarding by providing protection in places through which entering ...