The Evolution of Process Safety: Current Status and Future Direction

Imperative of Integrating Process Safety Education in Chemical Engineering Curricula

The integration of process safety education into chemical engineering programs has become a pressing necessity for chemical engineers worldwide. However, some chemical engineering programs have not yet incorporated process safety into their curricula. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to encourage a discussion on the imperative of mobilizing a global update of chemical engineering education and integrating process safety. This initiative will not only inspire experts in the field to support those seeking this change but also encourage new participants, especially from countries that have not yet embraced this much-needed transformation in chemical engineering education.

Risk assessment for handling hazardous substances within the European industry: Available methodologies and research streams

After the Seveso disaster occurred more than 40 years ago, there has been an increasing awareness of the potential impacts that similar accident events can occur in a wide range of process establishments, where the handling and production of hazardous substances pose a real threat to society and the environment. In these industrial sites denominated "Seveso sites," the urgent need for an effective strategy emerged markedly to handle hazardous activities and to ensure safe conditions. Since then, the main challenging research issues have focused on how to prevent such accident events and how to mitigate their consequences leading to the development of many risk assessment methodologies. In recent years, researchers and practitioners have tried to provide useful overviews of the existing risk assessment methodologies proposing several reviews. However, these reviews are not exhaustive because they are either dated or focus only on one specific topic (e.g., liquefied natural gas, domino effect, etc.). This work aims to overcome the limitations of the current reviews by providing an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the risk assessment methodologies for handling hazardous substances within the European industry. In particular, we have focused on the current techniques for hazards and accident scenarios identification, as well as probability and consequence analyses for both onshore and offshore installations. Thus, we have identified the research streams that have characterized the activities of researchers and practitioners over the years, and we have then presented and discussed the different risk assessment methodologies available concerning the research stream that they belong to.

Sustainable Safety Management: A Safety Competencies Systematic Literature Review

Title: Safety competencies: A systematic literature review. Background: Safety competency is believed to be a pillar of an organization’s safety culture and one of the safety climate dimensions. Safety competencies can be a vital point to controlling and maintaining the sustainability of safety and health in a society and organization. The sustainability of the industries’ and society’s safety relationship can be driven by the controlled hierarchy in the society and the competencies of its members. Failure to identify social sustainability indicators such as a leading competency in safety will cause a failure in the safety development program. Hence, a systematic literature review of published studies is essential for easing the dissemination of useful research findings and gaining access to future trends in safety competencies research. The review aimed to identify studies about safety competency and identified the basic safety competencies for the workforce to maintain a sustainable safety climate. Methods: This review provided a five-step approach guided by The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 statement and published systematic review framework. The studies from the past 20 years were retrieved from electronic databases such as Scopus, Science Direct, and Web of Science. The review only involved article papers, research papers, and review papers which are written in English. The quality of the review was assessed using a standard PRISMA 2020 checklist. This review is registered on the International Platform of Registered Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (INPLASY) with registration number INPLASY202230246 and DOI number 10.37766/inplasy2022.3.0146. Findings: The unbiased and wide review produces a new, feasible alternative to a social sustainability safety index. The number of studies on safety competencies study has expanded in recent years which shows the importance of the item to sustain the safety climate. This review suggests teamwork, communication skills, and a foundation of safety knowledge as the basic safety competencies for workers based on the competencies being most discussed. The review process suggests the possibility of future research regarding safety competencies after a catastrophic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic and sustainability of industrial safety regarding human-machine integration through 4.0 Industrial Revolution era.

On Process Intensification through Membrane Storage Reactors

In this work, a dynamic, one-dimensional, first principle-based model of a novel membrane storage reactor (MSR) process is developed and simulated. The resulting governing equations are rendered dimensionless and are shown to feature two dimensionless groups that can be used to affect process performance. The novel process is shown to intensify production of a desired species through the creation of two physically distinct domains separated by a semipermeable boundary, and dynamic operation. A number of metrics are then introduced and applied to a case study on Steam Methane Reforming, for which a parametric study is carried out which establishes the superior performance of the MSR when compared to a reactor operating at steady state (SSR).

Analysis of the Correlation between Occupational Accidents and Economic Factors in China

One of the important factors affecting the production safety of a country or region is the level of economic development. Avoiding accidents under the condition of ensuring economic development is a problem that needs in-depth research. On the basis of collecting the data of occupational accidents and economic development indicators in China from 2000 to 2020, this paper studies the relationship between occupational accidents and five economic indicators, such as resident consumption, energy consumption, education funds, wage level and research input. The grey working accident model of Gaussian function is established, the occurrence trend of occupational accidents is quantitatively analyzed, and the accident reduction measures are suggested based on the relationship between accidents and economy. The results show that there is a strong correlation between accident and economic indicators, and the comprehensive correlation coefficient among scientific research investment, education funds and accident indicators is significantly higher than that of other economic indicators. Increasing investment in scientific research and education is conducive to improving the quality of workers and training safety professionals and can effectively reduce workplace accidents.

Impact of Safety Culture on Safety Performance; Mediating Role of Psychosocial Hazard: An Integrated Modelling Approach

We conceptualize that safety culture (SC) has a positive impact on employee’s safety performance by reducing their psychosocial hazards. A higher level of safety culture environment reduces psychosocial hazards by improving employee’s performance toward safety concerns. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how psychosocial hazard mediates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. Data were collected from 380 production employees in three states of Malaysia from the upstream oil and gas sector. Structural equation modeling was implemented to test the suggested hypotheses. The proposed model was evaluated using structural equation modeling. A stratified sampling with a Likert 5-point scale was used to distribute the questionnaires. Furthermore, the proposed model was tested using the simulation of the structural equation and partial. According to our findings, all hypotheses were significant. A review of prior studies was used to select the items of the dimension for the data collection. Safety culture was assessed with psychosocial hazard to determine its direct and indirect impact on safety performance. Results suggest that to enhance safety performance (leading and lagging), psychosocial concerns in the workplace environments should be taken into consideration by employees. In addition, the findings showed that the psychosocial hazard fully mediates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance.

The measurement equivalence of a safety climate measure across five faultlines

This study examines the appropriateness of comparing safety climate survey responses across multiple faultlines-hypothetical dividing lines that split a group into subgroups based on one or more attributes. Using survey data from 8790 employees of a multinational chemical processing and manufacturing company from 76 work sites nested within 19 different countries, we examined the multilevel measurement equivalence of a safety climate measure across cultural dimensions, survey languages, organizational hierarchy, employment arrangements, and work environments. As simulation studies support the faultline at the individual-level requires measurement equivalence tests that are different from the faultline at the country-level, we used multi-group multilevel confirmatory factor analyses for the Level-3 faultline, and multilevel factor mixture models for known classes for the Level-1 faultlines. The results demonstrated that faultlines can prevent safety climate measurement equivalence, which prohibits the aggregation of individual-level scores to higher levels and making comparisons across faultlines. This first study on multilevel safety climate measurement equivalence serves as both a warning to safety climate researchers and practitioners regarding the importance of faultlines and reminds us to consider the level of the faultlines when testing measurement equivalence with multilevel data.

Process intensification

Process intensification (PI) is a rapidly growing field of research and industrial development that has already created many innovations in chemical process industry. PI is directed toward substantially smaller, cleaner, more energy-efficient technology. Furthermore, PI aims at safer and sustainable technological developments. Its tools are reduction of the number of devices (integration of several functionalities in one apparatus), improving heat and mass transfer by advanced mixing technologies and shorter diffusion pathways, miniaturization, novel energy techniques, new separation approaches, integrated optimization and control strategies. This review discusses many of the recent developments in PI. Starting from fundamental definitions, microfluidic technology, mixing, modern distillation techniques, membrane separation, continuous chromatography, and application of gravitational, electric, and magnetic fields will be described.