Process Safety | PSM Training and Information

What is Process Safety?

Process Safety is that part of overall safety that ensures that processes handling hazardous, toxic, flammable, explosive, pressurized materials work safely, without causing accidents and bad consequences to people, assets/equipment and the environment.

This term is mainly used only in the “process industries”, which are industries that handle and process bulk raw materials in relatively huge quantities (think chemicals manufacturing, oil and gas production, petroleum refining and similar). In these industry sectors, it is common to handle large quantities of flammable, explosive or toxic substances, often at high temperatures and pressure (or under vacuum).

What are Process Safety courses?

There is no one single Process Safety training course, because it is a subject with a wide scope. There are many areas which you need to know in order to learn process safety. These include Industrial Toxicology, Risk Assessment techniques such as HAZOP, understanding how fires and explosions happen and more. Abhisam has a separate course on each of these areas. Scroll below to see the complete list.

What is Safety?

Safety is simply defined as “freedom from harm”. It is the expectation of every human being, to have a safe environment. In order to achieve this, different means are employed. So we need to have a safe home, a safe work environment, a safe means of transport and so on. Safety by itself is a vast subject and there are various sub disciplines within it.

For example, we may reduce the risk of overflow of a day tank, by having an overflow pipeline that will divert the excess flow to another tank, located at a lower level. In this case safety is achieved purely by the right piping and the use of gravity. This can be considered an example of achieving overfill protection by mechanical means and using Process Safety principles.

When operators of this unit shown above use Personal Protection Equipment such as helmets, gloves or safety shoes, they are following principles of Occupational Safety.

What kinds of safety are employed in manufacturing plants?

In a nutshell, in a manufacturing plant, especially in the process industries such as Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, Power generation, Nuclear and similar we achieve safety via Process Safety, Functional Safety and Occupational Safety. In case the plant or facility has materials that are flammable or explosive, then we also use principles of Hazardous Area management to ensure safety. In case the facility uses computerized Automation systems such as DCS or PLC or SCADA or a SIS, then we also need to maintain cyber security of these systems in order to ensure overall safety.

In non-process industry sectors (such as automobile manufacturing or discrete parts manufacturing some widgets), the discipline of process safety is almost non-existent (except if the industry uses equipment such as steam boilers or oil or gas fired furnaces). In these sectors, machinery safety & occupational safety are dominant. Many of the machines that are on the shop floor are operated by workers, who work  in close proximity to them. They are vulnerable to being hurt and hence modern machines have sophisticated protection mechanisms like hand protection interlocks, light curtains, high reliability emergency stop switches and so on. Machine safety using such devices is considered a part of Functional Safety.

Abhisam has online courses, workshops & consulting services on all the above areas.  On this page, we will be only discussing Functional Safety, Safety Intergity Level (SIL) and and Safety Instrumented Systems. You can explore other pages of the Abhisam site to get more information on HAZOP,  LOPA, Hazardous Area Classification, Industrial Cybersecurity, Personal Protective Equipment and similar related subjects.