Hazard and Risk Analysis Flashcards
Define Risk in Hazard analysis:
Combination of the frequency or probability of a specified hazardous event and its consequence.
Define Risk when the consequence can be quantified:
Product of frequency of an event and its consequence.
Why do we need to quantify risks?
To identify high risk hazards for which particular care should be taken.
What is probability when talking about risk?
A measure for the likeliness that an event will occur
What does it mean when two events are independent?
If the occurrence of one does not affect the probability of the other.
What does it mean when two events are mutually exclusive?
If the both cannot occur at the same time.
What cant complete independence in safety systems be hard to achieve?
The reason for one system failing might be the reason for another failing.
What does FMEA stand for?
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
What is FMEA?
A systematic method for identifying and preventing product and process problems before they occur.
What is a brief overview of FMEA?
- Divide system into components/subsystems
- Identify all ways a particular component of a subsystem can fail and the effects of the failure on the system
- Systematically analyse the failures
Define failure modes:
The ways a component of a system can fail.
Expand on “Assess each subsystem and determine whether the failure of the subsystem would affect the main system”:
- If the subsystem has no effect, ignore it
- Otherwise, break the subsystem into further subsystems and repeat the process until the component level is reached.
Expand on: “Assess the failure’s effects” in the FMEA proccess:
- Usually the worst-credible case is accessed
- Determine its mission phase (installation, operations, maintenance and repair)
- Identify whether the failure is a single-point failure
- Determine methods of corrective action.
What is a single-point failure?
Failure of a single component that could bring down the entire system
What are some limitations of FMEA?
- FMEA creates products which are correct as opposed to safe.
-Contributes but doesn’t guarantee safety. - Only investigates single point failures
- FMEA is primarily and engineering tool not a safety analysis tool
What does FMECA stand for?
Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis
How is FMECA different to FMEA?
FMECA analyses the risk ascociated with a failure and if the risk exceeds a certain value action must be taken.
For each failure it determines:
- the probability of its occurrence
- the probability of the occurrence of the consequences
- a number measuring the criticality
What are Risk Priority Numbers (RPN)?
Calculated by the product of a measure for severity, probability and detection (likelihood that cause of failure is detected before reaching customer).
What does HAZOP stand for?
Hazard and Operability Studies
Where is HAZOP mainly used?
Chemical industries
What is the general procedure of HAZOP?
- Define objectives and scop of the analysis
- Select a HAZOP team
- Dissect design into nodes and identify lines into those nodes
- Analyse deviations for each line and identify hazard control methods
- Document results
- Track hazard control implementation.
What is a node?
A location where process parameters can change
What is a line?
Interface between nodes.
What are some examples of guide words?
- No
- More
- Less
- As well as
- Part of
- Reverse
- Other than
- Early
- Late
- Before
- After