Virtual training enhances process safety

 http://tradearabia.com/news/EDU_322350.html

Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

Excellent video on engulfment by MSHA

For personnel handling solid raw matarials, this is an excellent video by MSHA in this link.

 Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

Training tackles memory distortion to improve process safety

 Training tackles memory distortion to improve process safety


Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

PROCESS SAFETY TRAINING SERVICES BROCHURE

To all my readers, please find the process safety training brochure listing out the various topics I provide training in this link. 

 
Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

3D virtual simulator for chemical plants

Now this is one technology driven change that sure is going to benefit process safety! The Department of Energy is running a program with West Virginia University to test 3D virtual simulators for training process plant simulators. Read an article about this in this link.

Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

Distilleries are Dangerous!

I have visited many distilleries in sugar plants. When compared to chemical plants, the operators knowledge of process safety is limited. In one of the distilleries, the operators were not aware of the reason why the water level was being maintained at the bottom of a flare tower. As experienced people leave the organization, it becomes all the more important for management to implement a process safety management system in distilleries. An incident in a distillery which experienced a nitric acid spill and was subsequently closed is given in this link.

Avoid making your operators into procedural robots

I was reading an incident report of a ammonia pipeline rupture in the USA. The pipeline ruptured and released a large amount of ammonia. The case study report available in NTSB website indicates that even though the operator was receiving a large amount of alarms indicating a pipeline rupture, he attributed the drop in line pressure to less supply and more delivery. This skewed his troubleshooting abilities. How many of you are ensuring that your plant operators are trained to analyze data from DCS and troubleshoot the problem? There is no better defense than a trained and informed operator and your plant training programs should ensure this. During an emergency an operator cannot refer to procedures and all his training and knowledge will come to the forefront in troubleshooting the problem correctly.

Process Safety -Fatigue and training

Between 2007 and 2009, at least 6 commercial aircraft in India landed on the wrong runway. Fatigued crew and lack of training are supposed to be the reasons. Just ponder for a moment - if incidents like these can happen in the aviation industry, can we in the Chemical Industry ignore these issues? Fatigue and training are issues which are relevant to process safety and a lot of work has been done on shift schedules and circadian rhythms.Overtime in a process plant brings about its own problems. My own experience is that a number of incidents happen when the operator is on overtime. We cannot blame the operator. The bigger issue is whether the organisation has a training program that always has manpower in the pipeline - to replace sudden resignations. Just like the software industry, the chemical process industry in India needs to have trained people "on the bench". But this always has its costs. It finally depends on how much risk the organization is prepared to take.

Training in the Aviation and Chemical Process Industry - why different approaches?

With the advancement of instrumentation in the chemical industry,today plants are operated by DCS systems. These systems are excellent from a data collection and control point of view. The more I look at it, it appears that plant control rooms are now beginning to look like a plane's cockpit! While a pilot (similar to a control room operator) is put through mandatory rigorous training before he commands a plane, there are no mandatory requirements for the qualification of a control room operator. I was earlier a simulator trainer in a methanol plant in Saudi Arabia and I realized the enormous benefits of the benefits of investing in a chemical plant simulator. We could study and give feedback on the trainees response to various artificially created abnormal scenarios. In India, the concept of simulator training is yet to catch on. With the software experts available in India cannot we provide simulators that are cost effective?
I believe the simulator training is mandatory in the Indian Nuclear Industry but not in the chemical industry. Comments are welcome.