the 29th of April at Republic Cafe & Bar, attracted almost 130 guests. Tasmanian electrical engineer Shalini Verma won the door prize - an iPod Shuffle donated by R2A.
Dr Marlene Kanga (Senior Associate) is a member of the National Committee for Women in Engineering.
Safety Case Guideline
As part of the Victorian Chapter of the Risk Engineers Society's Guideline Review Sub-committee, Tim Procter (Chair) and Gaye Francis were involved in the revision the Safety Case Guideline. (now also subtitled An Engineers' View of the Safety Imperative). As a result of the 2004 Maxwell review, there have been substantive changes to the Victorian OH&S legislation, resulting in the introduction of new regulations on 1 July 2007. The subcommittee discussed a number of issues:
- A duty of care approach, given that the safety cases are increasingly seen as liability management tools
- The shift from 'acceptable' to 'not tolerable' risk
- The use of the legal standard 'good' instead of 'best' practice
- A focus on recognised good practice controls for known hazards, rather than scientifically unrepeatable risk assessment (like QRA's), especially to prevent delays in implementing controls.
The revised guideline is to be published by Engineer's Media engineering guidelines online (EGO) at www.engineersmedia.com.au/bookshop/epub.html.
Canberra Risk Chapter Seminar
Richard Robinson recently presented the Engineers Australia Risk Society Canberra Chapter's half-day Risk Business seminar in Canberra, which attracted over 50 attendees.
SIL Allocation
The rise of IEC (now also AS) 61508 the functional safety assessment standard for electronic equipment, and its derivative standards 61511 for the process industry and 62061 for the safety of machinery seems to have caught much of Australian industry on the hop.
In R2A’s experience, the difficulty chiefly arises because the SIL Allocation process required is usually done bottom-up outside the context of the Australian legal framework which includes OHS legislation and common law liability provisions. The result is a test of negotiating strength between the contracting parties with SIL allocations being more a result of agreement by exhaustion than positive common consent. Needless to say, such a result is time consuming, frustrating and invariably expensive.
Based on various experiences with contracts in Queensland and New South Wales, R2A Director Gaye Francis presented a paper to the Variable Speed Limit National Forum in Queensland outlining the R2A approach. The R2A approach is described Chapter 23 of the 7th Edition of the R2A Text. It has 6 steps:
- Establish all credible, critical safety threat scenarios
- Develop relevant threat-barrier sequences for each of 1)
- Determine the SIL rating for all barriers.
- Establish the E/E/PE SIL contribution to each barrier.
- Complete and E/E/PE SIL hazard control system failure analysis
- Complete a generative review sign-off.
Such an approach has significant benefits. In very many cases there will be no E/E/PE aspect, that is, these will be exclusively civil or mechanical design barriers. However, if required, the potential contribution of the individual E/E/PE SIL to each barrier is then determined.
If there is an E/E/PE contribution then it is subject to two further constraints:
- There is no point in having an E/E/PE SIL more reliable than the individual barrier is constrained to by, for example, the reliability of the mechanical aspects of the barrier.
- The safety outcomes of a particular threat scenario are determined by the collective independent barriers, especially those prior to the loss of control point. If there are multiple barriers, there may be little point in having a barrier with an elevated E/E/EP SIL contribution or alternatively another barrier (external risk reduction facility or ERRF) may be best. As an observation on risk design philosophy, it is almost always better (and cheaper) to have a larger number of low reliability, independent barriers than to have one or two highly reliable (gold plated) barriers.
The bottom-up approach tends to miss the overall risk context necessitating a higher E/E/PE SIL rating for what can only be seen to be the primary safety barrier.
Profile
Alain Ducheyne
Alain was born in Oostede, Belgium in 1983. While all his ancestors were fishermen and his father a pilot, Alain chose to go into engineering - firstly because, as anyone who knows him can remember, he has always tried to invent wacky things; and secondly, because he was too stubborn to take his father's advice upon finishing high school. Alain ended up in a college in Kortrijk studying general engineering for two years, and then went on to specialise in biochemistry graduating in 2005.
Alain was then offered a job as a marine cargo surveyor in the ports of Zeebrugge, Ghent and Antwerp for Intertek Caleb Brett, where he performed tasks relating to quantity, quality and safety assurance for a variety of high profile clients, as well as managing operations of the satellite office in Zeebrugge.
He says Australia is similar to other places, but feels the stereotypical laid-back lifestyle is only partially true - working life can still be stressful, though the office is far more relaxed than in Europe and far more professional than in the US. He also likes that Australians are very accepting of others, with corporate types not thinking twice about different social circles when mixing with Goths on trains, for example.
Alain also finds the Australian cuisine a little baffling - with fairy bread, hedgehogs and meat pies, not to mention ham and cheese croissants (and abomination he says. The true way is to dunk the pastry into hot chocolate milk). He also finds water restrictions to be intriguing, given most Europeans have not encountered it before, and the fact that few Australians actually consider it in their daily water use.
Lastly, he's discovered the notion that Australia is always warm is a myth, And just for the record, he's yet to see a crocodile or a koala. |
