Plant safety at any cost?
Don't get me wrong: it's hard to argue with current moves to streamline health and safety legislation, in line with Lord Young's 'Common Sense, Common Safety' report – especially given that chief among the aims is to reduce the bureaucratic burden on small companies. If that makes the UK a more attractive place for employers to set up plants, resulting in increased employment, more tax revenue, and a stimulated and revitalised economy, that's good news.
Planting seeds of recovery
There is a part of all of us that agrees with the notion 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. But, equally, when it comes to plant maintenance and operations, the purpose of this activity is to minimise the risk to the business of expensive downtime or outage, and perhaps prevent it happening in the first place. The management and mitigation of risk and probability of unwanted events occurring is key to successful business continuity.
Safety and savings
Compressed air continues to offer many advantages in process industry applications, especially in hazardous areas, but often continues to be used inefficiently. Help - much of it free - is readily available to help reduce energy costs and technical solutions often have surprisingly short payback times, which are likely to become even shorter as energy prices rise.
Intrinsically safe?
Hazardous areas and electrical/electronic circuits have been treated with caution ever since the Senghenydd colliery disaster of 1913. Brian Tinham provides a technology update
The benefit of hindsight now
BP's long awaited report into the causes of its oil rig explosion and the worst oil spill in US history is finally out (page 8). The Deepwater Horizon saga makes grim reading, providing, as it does, a detailed study of the sequence of events BP believes led to the disaster – and the engineering, training and human inadequacies behind them.
Hazardous electrics
Hazardous areas demand properly certified equipment – and that applies to maintenance kit, too. But cost and efficiency are also key. Gordon Low examines the issues
Dust explosion
Running motors and low voltage ac drives on plants with dusty environments has been regulated under the ATEX directives since 2006. Steve Ruddell explains the detail
Control freak
Let's talk about drives, motors and controls - no, not just the technologies for linear or rotational motion control, important though those are, but also control engineering in, for example, transportation, the process sector and the utilities. Why? Because there's quite a lot happening that could make a difference to plant engineers specifying, installing, commissioning and maintaining all of this stuff.
Don't trust to luck
While the risk of a prison sentence as a result of an accident resulting from the non-observance of safety regulations remains small, it is a possibility. The legal complications and potential damage to a business as a consequence of a serious accident is so great that not paying them proper attention would be a policy of complete idiocy.
Bellows baloney
Contrary to popular misconception, metal bellows expansion joints are as useful as any other of the tools in the plant engineer's armoury - provided good mechanical engineering practice is followed. So says bellows manufacturer Teddington Engineered Solutions, the firm whose predecessor's equipment was linked to the Flixborough disaster 34 years ago.