Safety Database

Introduction to Safety Engineering

 

The main goal of safety engineering is to manage risk, eliminate it, or minimized it to an acceptable level. Risk is a combination of the probability of a failure event and the severity of its consequences. For example, the severity of a particular failure outcome may be casualties, property damage, or just distress, with no other impact. Failure event rates may be frequent, occasional, or infrequent. The acceptability of failure is related to the above two, and the probability of a failure event will be less predictable than the severity of its outcome, because there are many factors that can cause failures, such as mechanical failure, environmental factors, and operating errors.

 

Safety engineering seeks to minimize the frequency of failures and to ensure that when failures occur, the consequences are not fatal. For example, bridges can be designed to carry a maximum load that is greater than the maximum truck weight that will pass, which reduces the possibility of bridge overloading. Many bridges are designed with redundant load-carrying structures so that even if one structural element fails, the load can be carried by other structures, which reduces the severity of bridge overloading consequences.

 

Ideally, safety engineering should be participated early in the project design stage, with safety engineers considering under what circumstances undesired events might occur, possible alternative solutions and relative accident preventive measures could be adopted. By integrating safety considerations in the early stage of production, by modification of service, method of production, or nature of the product, risk could be controlled effectively at a relatively low cost. In this approach, hazards could be eliminated or minimized.

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