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Engineering Professionalism ENG101: Safety and Risk

This document discusses engineering professionalism and safety considerations in design. It notes that absolute safety is not attainable, but improvements often cost money, and unsafe products can incur secondary costs like lawsuits. When determining how safe to make a product, engineers must consider primary costs of safety measures and secondary costs of failures or issues. Testing cannot provide full knowledge of risks, and uncertainties remain in materials and how designs may perform under different conditions. A key principle is that a design should be safe if its capabilities exceed expected duties, though both capabilities and duties are difficult to determine precisely. A risk-benefit analysis should consider benefits and risks to different parties. Making products safer does not always increase costs if safety is considered in initial designs. Examples of

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Abdullah Masood
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36 views13 pages

Engineering Professionalism ENG101: Safety and Risk

This document discusses engineering professionalism and safety considerations in design. It notes that absolute safety is not attainable, but improvements often cost money, and unsafe products can incur secondary costs like lawsuits. When determining how safe to make a product, engineers must consider primary costs of safety measures and secondary costs of failures or issues. Testing cannot provide full knowledge of risks, and uncertainties remain in materials and how designs may perform under different conditions. A key principle is that a design should be safe if its capabilities exceed expected duties, though both capabilities and duties are difficult to determine precisely. A risk-benefit analysis should consider benefits and risks to different parties. Making products safer does not always increase costs if safety is considered in initial designs. Examples of

Uploaded by

Abdullah Masood
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Engineering Professionalism

ENG101

Safety and Risk


Design Considerations, Risk

• Principles:
• Absolute safety is not attainable
• Improvements in safety often cost $$
• Products that are not safe incur secondary costs:
• Loss of customer goodwill and/or customers
• Warranty expenses
• Litigation
• Business failure? Loss of your professional
employees? Bad climate/hiring potential?

2
Design principle, risk/trade-offs

How safe should we


make a product?

There are trade offs...

P = primary cost
of a product
(including safety
measures)

S = secondary costs

Ethical issues!
3
Knowledge of Risk

• Safety issues, even for standard products, are


often not well understood
• Information is often not shared between industries, or
even engineers in an organization
• Always new application of old technology so we do not
know what our products will encounter.

• Uncertainties in design cause risk


• Engineers use “safety factors” in design

4
Uncertainties in design...
• Examples:
• Uncertainties in
materials (e.g., what
does the silver or gold
band on a resistor
mean?). Supplier’s data
based on statistical
averages? What is the
underlying probability
density function?

• Designs that do well


under static loads often
do not do well under
dynamic loads

https://youtu.be/XggxeuFDaDU 5
Design Principle: Safe if
Capability Exceeds Duty

6
Do we know capability and duty?

• No, not precisely, we must determine (estimate) it!


• Testing for safety
• Design tests with the above comments in mind
• Be careful to do accurate tests, be honest in trying to
find the problem
• Sometimes it may be good to get an outsider’s
perspective
• Be careful with the results of other’s tests - don’t just
blindly trust them when it comes to safety

7
Cont…

• Testing cannot always be performed


• Failures would be catastrophic
• Tests are too expensive

• What do to in these cases?


• Scenario analysis
• Fault tree analysis

8
Risk-Benefit Analysis

• Risk-Benefit Analysis
• Is a product worth the risks connected with its use?
• What are the benefits? To whom?
• Do they outweigh the risks? To whom? Environmental
impact?

“Under what conditions, if any, is someone in


society entitled to impose a risk on someone else
on behalf of a supposed benefit to yet others?”

9
Risk-Benefit Analysis

• How do you place value in $$ on a human life??


Recall cost-benefit analysis. Human
rights/dignity/respect?
• Engineers often supply facts on risk. Caution!
• Example: Operator error and negligence are
most often not the principle causes of accidents
- often unsafe conditions that are incorrectly
assessed

10
Making a product safe does not
automatically increase costs
• Safety should be built into the original design
• Warnings are often not adequate, cannot fall back on insurance!
• Must “embed” safety; requires competence, broad perspective!

• Examples: Improved safety


• Magnetic door catch on a refrigerator (safety for less money!)
• Ground-fault interrupter (but costs some?)
• Motor reverse circuit (no cost)

11
Making a product safe does not
automatically increase costs

12
Fail-Safe and Safe-Exit

• Examples of “fail-safe” systems:


• Concealed headlights on a car
• Elevators?
• “Safe-exits” are important (fail safe,
abandon/escape safe):
• Three Mile Island, Chernobyl

13

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