(63a) Benefits of Customizing Dust Hazard Controls to Meet Your Needs

The OSHA Combustible Dust National Emphasis Program (NEP) and attention from insurance companies have brought more urgency to combustible dust safety. NFPA standards have established prescriptive standards for combustible dust safety in industry. While that is a great improvement from conditions of past decades, the situation can be improved even more by implementing risk-based methods to help develop application specific explosion protection.

Many facilities that handle combustible particulate solids follow prescriptive requirements of applicable NFPA standards. Decisions are often driven primarily by meeting codes and standards with minimum capital cost, not a comprehensive Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). This presentation discusses how seeking to fully understand your specific dust hazards is an effective risk-based approach to selecting combustible dust hazard controls. Methods such as HAZOP, FMEA, FTA and LOPA are useful to comprehensively understand risks better than simply applying the checklist found in the NFPA standard annex. Flexible, outside-the-box thinking in applying safeguards, IPLs, administrative controls, and facility siting provides a better solution than merely following prescriptive code.

Topics of discussion include:

• Factors influencing dust explosibility
• Dust Safety Management programs
• Ignition source control
• Combination of common protection devices and methods
• Material properties
• Operating conditions
• Consequence modeling of cascading effects to non-dusty or to PSM areas