During the past decade, large efforts were made by the US chemical and petrochemical industries to implement and maintain effective process safety management (PSM) and responsible care programs. Despite these large investments, incidents continue to occur at an alarming frequency. Many executives of leading companies are trying to understand why. A recent survey conducted by the US Chemical and Safety Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) concluded that reactive chemicals present a significant safety problem for the chemical process industries. Key root causes identified by the CSB survey included technical and management systems failures. This underscores the importance of the need to understand and manage chemical reaction hazards more effectively. We also believe that the “quality” of implementation, change management, and auditing of corporate PSM programs is the culprit. We focus in this short paper on incidents caused by runaway reactions and provide guidance on how to improve the “Quality” of managing chemical reactions hazards through a combination of screening and experimental tools. The screening tool we offer is the culmination of more than a decade of active work in the area of reaction hazards focused on finding a simple method of determining potential reaction hazards with limited data. One can easily apply this simple hazard index to a wide variety of liquid phase, gas phase, and solid phase reactions.
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