Chemical Engineering Transactions 31

The 14th EFCE Symposium on Loss Prevention and Safety Promotion in the Process Industries is the second organized in Italy by the Italian Association of Chemical Engineers (AIDIC), on behalf of the Loss Prevention Working Party of the European Federation of Chemical Engineers (EFCE), following the earlier conference in Taormina in 1992. First staged forty years ago, the Loss Prevention Symposium has grown as a successful series of international events attracting delegates from all over the world. Due to evolutionary changes in society, industry and technology, there is still a continuous need for research and development in the process safety, as new pressures and challenges appear. Among new pressures we recall that plants are ageing, requirements are going up, there is knowledge drain by personnel changes and downsizing, economic constraints force outsourcing, universities have funding problems and safety is not an educational attractive subject. New challenges are posed for example by process innovation and yet unexplored operative conditions, or new material involvement, with still unknown hazardous properties. This was amply illustrated by the presentations in sessions addressing material hazards. Further, process installations have become even more complex than ever and increasing newer risks are posed by process control and safeguarding equipments. The conference a provides a forum to share and gain experience on up-to-date topics in emerging risk assessment and management, such as the assessment of accident scenarios caused by natural hazards, the safety of conventional and nuclear energy systems, sustainable chemistry, the pursuit of inherent safety and resilience engineering. Some of the methodologies, theoretical approaches and data of the presentations are already applied and validated in industrial settings and academia, whilst others are at the forefront of basic research, reflecting the way ahead in process safety. To show that things still can go wrong sometimes, a number of interesting accident case histories were selected from the collected abstracts. In order to ensure the highest quality, the international committees worked on paper selection even harder than in the past. Since the selection process was much more time consuming, we split the scientific committee into five topic review teams led by theme leaders. The total number of submitted papers was 260. They were independently refereed by three international referees firstly, for preliminary acceptance, judging the abstract and secondly on the basis of the full text. The papers cover the following five themes: Risk Management and Regulatory Issues; Human Factors and Management Systems; Learning from Accidents and Knowledge Transfer; Process Safety Engineering; Material Hazards. After the rigorous blind review selection process 160 papers were accepted for publication in this issue of CET. All the papers are identified by a DOI number and are included into SCOPUS and ISI citation databases.