Combustible Dust Management Screening: Methodology and Tool Development

The requirement to conduct a Dust Hazard Analysis is now in place per NFPA Combustible Dust standards. This affects a wide variety of industries that have various levels of experience with implementing process safety management (PSM) systems. Companies or individual sites that do not have an existing combustible dust hazard management system, or sites with an out of date dust hazard analysis benefit from a coarse screening to identify key compliance gaps prior to any detailed gap assessment against applicable NPFA standards. This paper outlines a coarse screening approach that can be used as a first pass to evaluate a specific site’s processes for managing Dust Hazards, and is useful to identify areas of highest priority for managing combustible dust hazards.