System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering) [Hardcover]

Nicholas J. Bahr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997 | ISBN-10: 1560324163 | ISBN-13: 978-1560324164 | Edition: 1

As technological systems become more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify safety hazards and to control their impact. Engineers today are finding that safety and risk touch upon every aspect of any engineered process, from system design all the way through disposal. Employing highly pragmatic examples from a number of industries, System Safety Engineering and Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach provides a comprehensive and easily accessible guide on how to build safety into products as well as into industrial processes.
Using a systems approach, the text discusses the best system safety techniques used in various industries, types of hazard analyses, safety checklists and other safety tools, as well as techniques for investigating accidents. It explains how to set up a data management system for a system safety program, and delves into risk assessment, including ways to conduct a risk evaluation. While the book provides engineers with an efficient reference in a critical area, the clarity of the writing along with the case studies and illustrations makes this book accessible to non-technical professionals needing a how to guide for the safety management of complex systems. It is also used by graduate classes involved with ergonomics and occupational safety as well as engineering.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: CRC Press; 1 edition (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560324163
• ISBN-13: 978-1560324164
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #334,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good book for the student and the experienced professional, December 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering) (Hardcover)

I used this book to teach system safety engineering to graduate students. The author provides the reader a background into system safety that lays the ground work for a functional and proactive system safety process. This book provided workable examples to the student for comprehension of the material. Students as well as the instructor had a better understanding of system safety and the integration of the processes into general industrial and avaition safety programs/processes. I wish I had this book when I was trying to explain to my management what system safety engineering was and how it benefits the engineering department.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great textbook, September 6, 2007

By 

S. Walter (Fort Wayne, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering) (Hardcover)

System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment is an excellent reference on how to engineer safety and manage risk. The clarity of the writing combined with understandable examples makes this book an outstanding text for a course on engineering safe systems.

This book starts by introducing the need and benefits of implementing a system safety program providing context for the later material. Key safety concepts and definitions are then introduced with references to relevant government and industry standards. A pragmatic discussion follows on the necessity of management and organizational support for an effective safety program. The book then details specific techniques for hazard identification and analysis including HAZOP, fault tree, FMEA, FMECA and a few lesser known methodologies. The overview of human factors analysis begins with the observation that "human error is an out-of-tolerance action within the human machine system." This discussion provides a comprehensive framework for the more advanced material referenced in the section. The only weakness was the following section on software safety, which lacked detailed descriptions of state-of-practice analysis techniques. The analysis section is strengthened by the discussion of accident and failure reporting systems and the associated databases that are used to support accident and reliability analyses. The final chapters of the book provide a practical discussion of how to manage risk using tailored versions the various techniques introduced in the previous sections.

All in all, this is a worthwhile reference for systems engineers and safety officials.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating Systems Safety Overview, February 1, 2004

By 

Robert I. Hedges - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: System Safety Engineering And Risk Assessment: A Practical Approach (Chemical Engineering) (Hardcover)

In this book, Nicholas Bahr has taken the complex discipline of systems safety and made it accessible in a logical, useful format. The book is clear and well illustrated (although a couple of the charts are a bit cumbersome and unwieldy), and calls upon numerous case studies to illustrate key points. There are separate chapters of Hazard Analysis, Fault Tree Analysis, Safety Analysis in Engineering, and Safety Management.

While useful for engineers (particularly in the chemical processing or nuclear fields), this book is written in comprehensible terms that do not require an engineering background or technical education to understand. In fact, I believe that the biggest beneficiaries of this book are not engineers at all, but non-technical managers, who desperately need to understand safety systems, but often don't. In fact the chapter on Safety Management should be required reading for any manager in a safety critical environment, as it is an excellent "how to" guide to safety management of complex systems. This chapter has examples of correct safety management, and more importantly, excellent examples of the perils of management unwillingness to prioritize safety. The case study of the Nypro UK cyclohexane plant explosion in Flixborough, England is the best detailed, and has universal applications to safety systems across varying industries. The loss of the shuttle 'Challenger' is also reviewed from a systems safety vantage point, but while there are many errors to be analyzed and learned from there, more of the lessons are industry specific than are the lessons from the Flixborough example.

I used this book in a graduate class on systems safety. This is one of the best safety books I have seen, and is the most concise text on systems safety that I have ever read, far better, for instance, than the works of Perrow. Mr. Bahr is to be commended for his work; I look forward to reading more by him in the future.