Scope of a Safety Engineer

To perform their professional functions, safety engineering professionals must have education, training and experience in a common body of knowledge. They need to have a fundamental knowledge of physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

, chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

, biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

, physiology

Physiology

Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...

, statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

, mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

, computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

, engineering mechanics, industrial processes, business

Business

A business is an organization engaged in the trade of goods, services, or both to consumers. Businesses are predominant in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and administered to earn profit to increase the wealth of their owners. Businesses may also be not-for-profit...

, communication

Communication

Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...

 and psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

. Professional safety studies include industrial hygiene and toxicology

Toxicology

Toxicology is a branch of biology, chemistry, and medicine concerned with the study of the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms...

, design of engineering hazard controls, fire protection

Fire protection

Fire protection is the study and practice of mitigating the unwanted effects of fires. It involves the study of the behaviour, compartmentalisation, suppression and investigation of fire and its related emergencies, as well as the research and development, production, testing and application of...

, ergonomics

Ergonomics

Ergonomics is the study of designing equipment and devices that fit the human body, its movements, and its cognitive abilities.The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics as follows:...

, system and process safety

Process safety

Process safety focuses on preventing fires, explosions and accidental chemical releases in chemical process facilities or other facilities dealing with hazardous materials such as refineries, and oil and gas production installations.Occupational safety and health primarily covers the management of...

, system safety

System safety

The system safety concept calls for a risk management strategy based on identification, analysis of hazards and application of remedial controls using a systems-based approach...

, safety and health program management, accident investigation and analysis, product safety, construction safety, education and training methods, measurement of safety performance, human behavior

Human behavior

Human behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....

, environmental safety and health, and safety, health and environmental law

Environmental law

Environmental law is a complex and interlocking body of treaties, conventions, statutes, regulations, and common law that operates to regulate the interaction of humanity and the natural environment, toward the purpose of reducing the impacts of human activity...

s, regulations and standards. Many safety engineers have backgrounds or advanced study in other disciplines, such as management and business administration, engineering, system engineering / industrial engineering

Industrial engineering

Industrial engineering is a branch of engineering dealing with the optimization of complex processes or systems. It is concerned with the development, improvement, implementation and evaluation of integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information, equipment, energy, materials, analysis...

, requirements engineering

Requirements engineering

Requirements engineering is a systems and software engineering process which covers all of the activities involved in discovering, documenting and maintaining a set of requirements for a computer-based system...

, reliability engineering

Reliability engineering

Reliability engineering is an engineering field, that deals with the study, evaluation, and life-cycle management of reliability: the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time. It is often measured as a probability of...

, maintenance

Maintenance, Repair and Operations

Maintenance, repair, and operations or maintenance, repair, and overhaul involves fixing any sort of mechanical or electrical device should it become out of order or broken...

 , human factors

Human factors

Human factors science or human factors technologies is a multidisciplinary field incorporating contributions from psychology, engineering, industrial design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry...

, operations, education, physical and social sciences and other fields. Others have advanced study in safety. This extends their expertise beyond the basics of the safety engineering profession.

Functions of a Safety Engineer

The major areas relating to the protection of people, property and the environment are:

• Anticipate, identify and evaluate hazardous conditions and practices.

• Develop hazard control designs, methods, procedures and programs.

• Implement, administer and advise others on hazard control programs.

• Measure, audit and evaluate the effectiveness of hazard control programs.

• Draft a future safety plan and statement based on real time experiences and facts.

Personality and role

Oddly enough, personality issues can be paramount in a safety engineer. They must be personally pleasant, intelligent, and ruthless with themselves and their organization. In particular, they have to be able to "sell" the failures that they discover, as well as the attendant expense and time needed to correct them. They can be the messengers of bad news.

Safety engineers have to be ruthless about getting facts from other engineers. It is common for a safety engineer to consider software, chemical, electrical, mechanical, procedural, and training problems in the same day. Often the facts can be very uncomfortable as many safety related issues point towards mediocre management systems or worse, questionable business ethics.

Teamwork

It's difficult and expensive to retrofit safety into an unsafe system. To prevent safety problems, an organization should therefore treat safety as an early design and "architecture" activity, using the principles of Inherent safety

Inherent safety

Inherent safety is a concept particularly used in the chemical and process industries. An inherently safe process has a low level of danger even if things go wrong. It is used in contrast to safe systems where a high degree of hazard is controlled by protective systems...

, rather than as a "paperwork requirement" to be cleaned up after the real design is done.

Safety engineers also must work in a team that includes other engineering specialties, quality assurance, quality improvement, regulatory compliance specialists, educators and lawyers.

Subpar safety and quality problems often indicate underlying deficiencies in an organization's goals, recruitment, succession, training, management systems and business culture.

Safety often works well in a true matrix-management organization, in which safety is a managed discipline integrated into a project plan.

See also

• American Society of Safety Engineers
  American Society of Safety Engineers
  Founded in 1911, the American Society of Safety Engineers is the oldest safety society and is committed to protecting people, property and the environment. Its more than 33,000 occupational safety, health and environmental professional members manage, supervise, research and consult on safety,...
  
  
• Biomedical engineering
  Biomedical engineering
  Biomedical Engineering is the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology. This field seeks to close the gap between engineering and medicine: It combines the design and problem solving skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences to improve...
  
  
• Chemical engineering
  Chemical engineering
  Chemical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with physical science , and life sciences with mathematics and economics, to the process of converting raw materials or chemicals into more useful or valuable forms...
  
  
• Fire protection engineering
  Fire protection engineering
  Fire Protection Engineering is the application of science and engineering principles to protect people and their environments from the destructive effects of fire and smoke....
  
  
• Hazard Identification
  Hazard Identification
  A Hazard Identification Study or HAZID is a tool for hazard analysis, used early in a project as soon as process flow diagrams, draft heat and mass balances, and plot layouts are available. Existing site infrastructure, weather, and geotechnical data are also required, these being a source of...
  
  
• Life-critical
• Redundancy (engineering)
  Redundancy (engineering)
  In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe....
  
  
• Reliability engineering
  Reliability engineering
  Reliability engineering is an engineering field, that deals with the study, evaluation, and life-cycle management of reliability: the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time. It is often measured as a probability of...
  
  
• Safety engineering
  Safety engineering
  Safety engineering is an applied science strongly related to systems engineering / industrial engineering and the subset System Safety Engineering...
  
  
• Safety life cycle
  Safety life cycle
  The safety life cycle is the series of phases from initiation and specifications of safety requirements, covering design and development of safety features in a safety-critical system, and ending in decommissioning of that system....
  
  
• Security engineering
  Security engineering
  Security engineering is a specialized field of engineering that focuses on the security aspects in the design of systems that need to be able to deal robustly with possible sources of disruption, ranging from natural disasters to malicious acts...
  
  
• Zonal Safety Analysis
  Zonal safety analysis
  Zonal Safety Analysis is one of three analytical methods which, taken together, form a Common Cause Analysis in aircraft safety engineering under SAE ARP4761. The other two methods are Particular Risks Analysis and Common Mode Analysis . Aircraft system safety requires the independence of...
  
  

External links and sources

• Trevor Kletz
  Trevor Kletz
  Trevor Kletz OBE is a prolific British author on the topic of chemical engineering safety. He is credited with introducing the concept of inherent safety, and was a major promoter of Hazop.-Early life and education:...
  
  (1998) Process Plants: A Handbook for Inherently Safer Design CRC ISBN: 1560326190
• American Society of Safety Engineers (official website)
• Board of Certified Safety Professionals (official website)
• The Safety and Reliability Society (official website)