Amy Theis, Director Risk Management Services The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) CPL 03-00-008 Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program (NEP, reissued) has been in effect since March 11, 2008. The purpose of this OSHA NEP is to reduce the risk of fires and/or explosions occurring at facilities that handle combustible particulate solids. This Instruction references other applicable OSHA regulations and is supported by related National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standards. These NFPA standards include: This is where a corporate level combustible dust audit can hel ..read more

Please enjoy this latest edition of Process Safety News!   What's Inside: Letter from the President The Impact of Physical Properties for Reactive and Nonreactive Emergency Relief System Design – Part 1 Webinar Announcement: Reactive System ERS Design Basics & ERS Case Studies Don’t Get Zapped! Key Considerations During a Reactive Hazard Assessment Click here to read now!   ..read more

By Elizabeth Raines, Senior Chemical Engineer at Fauske & Associates, LLC eraines@fauske.com Evaluating chemical hazards is a crucial part of plant safety. Any chemical process should be robust by design; any given process can be subject to reasonable changes. A robust design should accommodate small changes without a catastrophic consequence. To develop an inherently safe process, hazards need to be identified and evaluated in order to either prevent, mitigate, or eliminate them. Reactive hazards are a special subset of chemical hazards that can be present whether the reaction is in ..read more

By Aaron Ruiz & Elizabeth Raines Adiabatic calorimetry is a powerful tool that can be used to support plant safety. A calorimeter is a device that is used to measure the amount of heat associated with chemical or physical processes. An adiabatic calorimeter is designed to ensure that there is no heat transferred between the system and its surroundings. Therefore, an adiabatic calorimeter is designed so that the exothermic heat produced by a reaction directly goes to increasing the temperature. As the temperature increases, the rate of reactions often exponentially increases. On a large pla ..read more

By Elizabeth Raines & Benjamin Doup, PhD Ensure your emergency relief system is adequately sized by accounting for two phase flow Introduction to Two Phase Flow In order to ensure your vessel is appropriately protected from possible overpressurization scenarios, it is crucial to consider multiphase or two-phase flow. The presence of two-phase flow can increase the required size of your relief device, relief piping, and/or the effluent handling systems. In the context of emergency relief system design, two‑phase vapor-liquid flow is very common due to the volume expansion of the initially a ..read more

By Clayton R. Johnson, PhD, Laboratory Scientist, Fauske & Associates, LLC FAI specializes in characterizing, preventing, and mitigating chemical reactivity hazards. Reaction and adiabatic calorimetry are two laboratory techniques FAI relies on to determine the thermal potential and reactivity of chemical systems. Reaction calorimetry (RC) quantifies the heat evolution and heat evolution rate of a chemical process under the desired reaction conditions. Adiabatic calorimetry does not hold the reaction conditions constant and is generally used to explore the undesired runaway reaction which ..read more

Dr. Hans Kare Fauske, age 85, passed from this life on September 27, 2021. Hans was the beloved husband of Judith (“Judi”) Gerdes Fauske for 57 years, loving father of Hans Kristian (“Kris”) Fauske (AnnMarie Fauske) and Kirk Ivar Fauske (partner Tori Harmon), devoted grandfather of Jake, Jaden and Kayd Fauske, and loving brother to Sigmund (preceded in death Riordan Fauske). At the time of his passing Dr. Fauske was Emeritus President of Fauske & Associates, LLC, an ANS Fellow, an AIChE Fellow, and Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Fauske completed his graduate education ..read more

Please enjoy our latest issue of Process Safety News - our quarterly process safety newsletter! Now in a new format optimized for printing! What's inside? Letter from the President In Memory of Dr. Hans K. Fauske, DSc Reaction Calorimetry: A Customizable Technique to Support Safe Process Scale-Up High Pressure VSP2 Calorimetry – A Unique Technique to Get Needed Data 7 Basics of Combustible Dust Sampling and Testing Small Modular Reactor and Isotope Production Experience Facility Siting Assessments Click the link below to download now ..read more

By Gabe Wood, Senior Chemical Engineer at Fauske & Associates, LLC. The versatile Vent Sizing Package 2 (VSP2) was originally developed as the DIERS Bench Scale Apparatus in 1985 until it was commercialized by FAI in 1987 as the VSP. This low thermal inertia calorimeter is capable of simulating a small scale reactor due to its effective stirring and multiple fill ports for metered or shot additions. The VSP2 collects temperature and pressure data over time to determine the temperature and pressure rise rates of a runaway chemical reaction as a function of temperature and these rates are di ..read more

By Elizabeth Raines, Senior Chemical Engineer at Fauske & Associates, LLC eraines@fauske.com Introduction Evaluating chemical hazards is a crucial part of plant safety. Any chemical process should be robust by design; any given process can be subject to reasonable changes. A robust design should accommodate small changes without a catastrophic consequence. To develop an inherently safe process, hazards need to be identified and evaluated in order to either prevent, mitigate, or eliminate them. Reactive chemical hazards are a special subset of chemical hazards that can be present whether th ..read more