Engineers responsibility for safety and risk

Engineers responsibility for safety and risk

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  Engineers Responsibility For SafetyAnd Risk
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  SAFETY AND RISK •Imagine you are a fresh graduate. • You get a job as an engineer in a large atomic power plant. • Would you take it or not? • Under what conditions would you take it? • Under what conditions would you not? • Why?
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  SAFETY According to WilliamW Lowrance, the famous consultant of those times, Safety was defined as “A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable.”
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  CONCEPT OF SAFETY •“A thing is safe if its risks are judged to be acceptable”.This approach helps underscore the notion that judgements about safety are tacity value judgements about what is acceptable risk to a given person or group. • Definition for Safety: A thing is safe (to a certain degree) with respect to a given person or group at a given time if, were they fully aware of its risks and expressing their most settled values, they would judge those risks to be acceptable (to that certain degree. Safety: Safe operation of system and the prevention of natural or human caused disaster.
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  RISK • “A riskis the potential that something unwanted and harmful may occur.” According to William D Rowe, potential for the realization of unwanted consequences from impending events.
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  TYPES OF RISKS •Acceptability of Risk: “a risk is acceptable when those affected are generally no longer apprehensive about it”. FACTORS: • Whether the risk is accepted voluntarily. • The effects of knowledge on how the probabilities of harm (or benefit) are known or perceived.
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  • Voluntarism andControl: The person who breaks a red signal, is prone to be a victim of an accident, but risks. A person who lives near a dumping yard is prone to ill-health, but neglects. A boy who rides a vehicle at a high speed cannot rely on the perfect functioning of the brakes. But these people take voluntary risks thinking they can control.
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  • Effective informationon Risk assessment: The acceptance of risks also depends on the manner in which information necessary for decision making is presented. A person can be motivated to violate the safety rules by explaining the higher probability of success, whereas the same person can be demotivated from such task, by explaining the probability of failure and the fatal effects of it.
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  Job-related Risks: In somejobs where the workers are exposed to chemicals, radiations and poisonous gases etc., they are not informed about the probable risks the workers would be facing, in doing their jobs. These are such dangers where the toxic environments cannot readily be seen, smelled, heard or sensed otherwise.
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  • Magnitude andProximity It is unfortunate that most of us, realize the magnitude of risk only when we ourselves or the person who is in our close proximity or a relative, gets affected. • The attitude of “out of sight, out of mind”. • The assumption that predictions for the future must be discounted by using lower probabilities. • The belief that a counter-measure will be found in time.
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  SAFETY AND THEENGINEER • Since safety is an esential aspect of our duties as engineers,how can we be sure that our designs are safe? There are four criteria that must be met to help ensure a safe design. • First,the minimum requirement is that a design must comply with the applicable laws. • Second,an acceptable design must meet the standard of “accepted engineering practice”. • Third,alternative designs that are potentially safer must be explored. • Finally,the engineer must attempt to foresee potential misuses of the product by the consumer and must design to avoid these problems.
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  DESIGNING FOR SAFETY •1. Define the problem:This step includes determining the needs and requirements and often invovles determining the constraints. • 2. Generate several solutions. Multiple alternative designs are created. • 3. Analyse each solution to determine the pros and cons of each.This step involves determining the consequences of each design solution and determing whether it solves the problem. • 4. Test the solutions. • 5. Select the best solution. • 6. Implement the cjosen solution.
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  RISK-BENEFIT ANALYSIS • Onemethod,which engineers sometimes use to help analyze risk and to determine whether a project should proceed,is called risk-benefit analysis. • As per the famous saying, “A Ship in harbor is safe. But that’s not what ships are built for” risk is somewhat common to be accepted. The most common risk we all take is driving an automobile in a traffic. Though we are not sure about the perfect functionality of the brake system and the timings of other drivers’ responses, we take risk.
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  ACCIDENTS • Procedural accidentsare perhaps the most common and are the result of someone making a bad choice or not following established procedures. • Enginners accidents are caused by flaws in the design. These are failures of material devices that do not perform as expected,or devices that do not develop in turbine blades in aircraft engines. • Systemic accidents are harder to understand and harder to control .They are characteristic of very complex technologies and complex organizationsthat are required to operate them.A perfect example of this phenomenon is airline industry.