STARTING MY 11TH YEAR OF BLOGGING!

Dear Readers,

Thank you for being with me for the past 10 years since I started my blog. 

1800 posts, 325000 views, about 800 incidents and many of my readers spreading the information from the posts through process safety one point lessons within their own organizations...I am still far from satisfied. My mission in life has been "Preventing another Bhopal" and let us not rest till we have achieved it. How can you help? By the following steps:

1. Never be silent when you see something going wrong - it could be a decision that is not in the interest of process safety - speak up!
2. Share past incidents (internal incidents and external incidents) and their root causes, with all your colleagues - we see the same old incidents repeating
3.  As an engineer, be ethical when taking decisions and do not take decisions because they please the boss
4. Update your technical knowledge continuously
5. Do not be carried away by all the technologies that vendors try to sell you. Thoroughly study them and employ only those technologies that are useful to you. Don't get carried away by Jargon.
6. Wear your engineering hat always, even when you go up the management ladder.
7. Be aware of normalization of deviations around you. Report them and determine the root causes. You work in a chemical plant. You and your colleagues should not have the misfortune of seeing people die before your eyes because of an incident....

I end by quoting Robert Frost, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have miles to go before I sleep"

The working of a flame arrester

 

Process safety beacon on flame arrestor

 https://www.aiche.org/sites/default/files/cep/20160420.pdf

Can a flame arrester element be made of a non metallic element?

Flame arresters are often provided on vent lines in atmospheric storage tanks storing flammable materials. The principle of operation is by cooling the flame and extinguishing it before it reached the inside of the tank. As the flame travels through the element, it is exposed to a large area of the element, which can be folded meshes etc. But do you know that the element inside does not necessarily have to be metal? The flame arrester element itself experiences very little warming, because it is subjected to a high temperature for a very short time. Heat transfer is initially due to convection/diffusion and then later due to conduction after flame has been extinguished. Hence non metallic elements like PTFE can be used to avoid plugging. See one vendors catalogue here https://www.protego.com/products/detail/FA-I-PTFE.html

Note: This is for information only.

CSB releases airgas safety spotlight

 https://www.csb.gov/csb-releases-airgas-safety-spotlight-/