Process Safety Management (PSM) as a lifecycle-wide program, the inherently safer design hierarchy, why overpressure protection matters and how relief systems work, and the layers of protection analysis (LOPA) method for judging whether existing safeguards are actually enough.
Process safety is a narrower, more specific discipline than general occupational safety — it's concerned with preventing unplanned releases of hazardous chemicals or energy that can escalate into a fire, explosion, or toxic exposure. This module works through the PSM elements as a connected system, the four-tier inherently safer design hierarchy (minimize, substitute, moderate, simplify), the real causes of vessel overpressure and how a PSV differs from a rupture disk, and how a LOPA study quantifies whether an independent protection layer is actually adequate.
Every idea here is the foundation Module 15's HAZOP methodology and Module 16's plant-operations content build directly on — HAZOP is this module's process hazard analysis element in practice, and plant operations is where these protections are maintained, or quietly eroded, day to day.