ENG305 Safety Risk & Reliability
Assignment 4
Safety in Design
Introduction
This assignment is to build on the previous assignments and to get you to now actively consider safety in the design of plants and operations right from the start rather than add it in at later stages. True safety in design is an intrinsic part of planning from day 1 and must be equally important as the engineering, finance, marketing and other considerations.
The Assignment
Now that you are familiar with asking the right question at the formative design meetings, have a little bit of experience in recognizing risks and hazards and dealing with them via control and mitigation strategies, comes the next stage.
A general plant layout of automobile manufacturing is required. Plant layout is a plan for effective utilisation of facilities for the manufacture of products; involving a most efficient and economical arrangement of machines, materials, personnel, storage space and all supporting services, within available floor space.
For creating the plant layout, you will use the plant that you described in Assignment 3. Once again, you are the safety expert, and it is now your role to ensure that the designs of the various major items of the plant and their layout is done to optimize all aspects of safety but still allow an efficient operation. The design of each of the plant items is being done by other Engineers who are experts in their field but not necessarily have your familiarity with safe design or be aware of the need to integrate a safety in design approach across the whole plant. Consider the following site location and floor space for creating the layout.
The site: 500m X 500m flat ground situated in the Humpty Doo area adjacent to the Arnhem Highway, near Darwin. Serviced by an all-weather sealed road with three phase powers at the site boundary. The land has appropriate zoning, and the plan has approval from the appropriate Planning Authority.
For creating a general automobile plant layout, you may take help from the supplementary file, namely, ‘Process design and system layout for automobile plant’ attached with this Assignment 4.
Tasks for the Safety Expert
You are required to select some aspects of this plant and/or its operations and to make a series of recommendations as to safety. Issues may include recommendations about the roadways on site, turning radii, clearance between buildings, safe stack heights of bundles, crane operations, forklift operations, lighting requirements both indoor and outdoor, positions of employee facilities, stocking of the medical room in the employees facility, fencing and/or gating needs of the site, sizing and positioning of the receiving area, fire-fighting needs, sizing and positioning of the main sheds and internal clearance heights etc.
This list is just some examples of the issues to think about. The list is not intended to be addressed or to limit your thinking but is included to give you an idea of the scope of the safety in design issues.
You are required to write a technical report of approximately 3,000 words detailing how you would address some issues similar to the above including your recommendations. Some of these are already covered by appropriate standards so you may need to do some research. Most are not and are dictated by the task at hand.
Marking is according to the rubric provided.