Drawings, Posters and Metaphors in Safety Science: Some Historical Remarks

Safety visualisations and their influences on safety concepts are presented. Visualisations like safety posters show a clear message of fear and guilt. This changes after World War II, due to a more tolerant atmosphere. Latent, organisational factors as decisive elements of accident processes appear in visualisations. An example shows a method...

An Approach to Update the Failure Rates of Safety Barriers Based on Operating Experience

Hazardous events in process plants like the leakage of dangerous substances can result in severe damage, and such an event is often defined as the TOP event of a fault tree analysis (FTA) in a quantitative risk analysis. The TOP event probability can then be calculated if the basic events probabilities are provided. These probabilities are often...

Linking Barrier Indicators to Major Accident Scenarios, a First Step to Predict Major Accident Scenarios

At the OCI Nitrogen ammonia plant, located at the Chemelot site in Geleen, The Netherlands, a project has been initiated to monitor major accident processes at the site. This contribution answers the question whether indicators can be derived from the barrier system status to provide information about the development and likelihood of the major...

Predicting major hazard accidents by monitoring their barrier systems: A validation in retrospective

OCI Nitrogen, one of Europe's largest fertilizer producers, is investigating the extent to which it is possible to take targeted measures at an early stage and stop the development of major hazard accident processes. An innovative model has been developed and recently explained and elaborated in a number of publications. This current paper...

Predicting major accidents in the process industry based on the barrier status at scenario level: A practical approach

OCI Nitrogen wants to gain knowledge of (leading) indicators regarding the process safety performance of their ammonia production process. This paper answers the question whether indicators can be derived from the barrier system status to provide information about the development and likelihood of the major accident processes in the ammonia...

Predicting major hazard accidents in the process industry based on organizational factors: A practical, qualitative approach

OCI Nitrogen seeks to gain knowledge of (leading) indicators regarding the process safety performance of their ammonia production process. The current sub-study raises the question whether major hazard accidents in the ammonia production process can be predicted from organizational factors, also called management delivery systems. This paper...

Determining a realistic ranking of the most dangerous process equipment of the ammonia production process: A practical approach

OCI Nitrogen seeks to gain knowledge of (leading) indicators regarding the process safety performance of their ammonia production process. The current research determines the most dangerous process equipment by calculating their effects resulting from a loss of containment using DNV GL's Phast™ dispersion model. In this paper, flammable and...

Een praktische aanpak voor het voorspellen van majeure ongevallen in de procesindustrie op basis van de barriere status op scenario niveau

OCI Nitrogen aims to build up knowledge of (leading) indicators that provide insight in advance into the process safety performance of their ammonia production process. Two sub-studies have already been published in TtA. The first sub-study focused on ranking the most dangerous process units of the ammonia production process. In the second sub...

Een praktische, kwalitatieve aanpak voor het voorspellen van majeure ongevallen in de proces- industrie op basis van organisatorische factoren

OCI Nitrogen aims to build up knowledge of (leading, proactive) indicators that provide insight into the process safety performance of the ammonia production process. Three sub-studies have already been published in TtA. The main question of this sub-study is whether major accidents in the ammonia production process can be predicted from...

Mechanical integrity of process installations: Barrier alarm management based on bowties

A Safety Research project was carried out in an ammonia plant of OCI Nitrogen, located at the Chemelot site in Geleen, The Netherlands. This research focused on the development of a method to monitor accident processes in the chemical industry mainly caused by mechanical integrity of static equipment like vessels, tanks and heat exchangers. A...

Safety in (petro)chemical clusters and stand-alone companies

In The Netherlands, there are six large (petro)chemical clusters. Companies in these clusters are located next or close to each other. The policy of the Dutch government is to invest in these clusters, and to stimulate their growth. However, there is little scientific evidence that a cluster of (petro)chemical companies is safer than stand...

Hoe effectief zijn procesveiligheidsindicatoren?: Indicatoren en managementfactoren

Procesveiligheidsindicatoren geven informatie over ongevalsscenario’s en over de effectiviteit van veiligheidsbarrières. Dat is de bedoeling. Het is de vraag of dat lukt. In de vakliteratuur wordt een onderscheid gemaakt tussen leidende (leading) en volgende (lagging) indicatoren. Dit lijkt overtuigend. Behalve bedrijven gebruikt ook de overheid...

Mechanical integrity of process installations: An assessment based on bow-ties

Research was carried out in an ammonia plant of OCI Nitrogen, located at the Chemelot site in Geleen, The Netherlands. It focuses on the development of process safety accident processes in which loss of mechanical integrity is one of the root causes. A significant share of the mechanical integrity scenarios originate from corrosion mechanisms...

Process safety indicators, how solid is the concept?

Monitoring progress of accident scenarios, and effectiveness of control measures is a main goal of safety indicators. From an overview of scientific literature one may conclude that indicators do not logically relate to current safety theories and models, their relation with accident processes is far from perfect, and a ‘silver bullet’ has...

Developing leading safety indicators for occupational safety based on the bow-tie method

In order to control occupational accidents, it is crucial to have a clear view on the potential accident scenarios that are present in a company. The bow-tie method is a way to capture and visualise these accident processes in an integrative way. Included in the bow-tie are safety barriers (both technical as organisational and human) and...

Een aanpak voor het bepalen van een realistische ranking van de gevaarlijkste procesonderdelen van het ammoniakproductieproces van het ammoniakproductieproces