Critical Considerations in Process Safety

Introduction

Process safety is a combination of actions with the objective of keeping risks under control and appropriately managed, aiming to anticipate and mitigate potential accidents. Process safety combines the expertise and knowledge of a number of disciplines, including design, engineering, and operations. The final objective of process safety is to help reduce the frequency and the consequences of incidents, which can result in harm to people, environmental harm, property damage, loss of production, and deterioration of the business image. The protection of workers should be reason enough to develop and comply with process safety, but legislation is in place to ensure that process safety becomes a priority for businesses.

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H.E.L’s Process Safety Solutions

Consideration of process safety throughout the product development pipeline from discovery to scale-up is essential to ensure the safe scale-up of chemical processes.

In Process Development, it is vital to understand how hazardous the selected synthesis reaction is and whether the plant cooling capacity is sufficient to mitigate these potential hazards. Hazard screening and reaction calorimetry both have a role to play when understanding a reaction itself. The move to scale-up is characterized by an increasing focus on the true extent of identified hazards, so plant safety design can be optimized accordingly. Adiabatic testing and HAZOP (hazard and operability) assessments come to the fore here. These considerations are summarized in the product development funnel in Figure 3.

Fig.3 – H.E.L Solutions in Process Safety and Scale-Up

Making safety an integral component of product development – by using a variety of tools to identify, assess and then mitigate the potential hazards at each stage of the process – ensures confidence in delivering a successful and efficient route to market.