Having a positive Safety Culture is central to good health and safety management. It is an indication of an organisation's determination and competence to control hazards at work. This paper describes an innovative project undertaken both to measure and to improve Safety Culture within a platform drilling contractor operating in the North Sea. In this context, safety culture is defined as 'the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation's health and safety management'. The project in itself was innovative, not in that the company recognised the problem and sought to assess it through the use of a Safety Culture survey, but that they also committed to using their entire workforce to help solve or improve upon issues highlighted by the survey. The process used in this project is one that other drilling contractors and operators within the Oil and Gas Industry should consider as a method for developing solutions to break the safety cycle and achieve continuous safety improvement. This paper describes the process of assessment and the results obtained. The successes and pitfalls of the approach and project are discussed in an attempt to guide others through the process. Introduction The drilling contractor, whose activities in the North Sea are restricted to platform drilling, has implemented systems and controls to manage and improve the company's HS&E performance. As a result the company's global safety performance has improved as measured by standard incident and accident data. The company recognises, however, that there is a limit to the health and safety performance an organisation can achieve without addressing the contribution which human factors have to play in eliminating occupational accidents and ill health. As an example of the variation in safety performance which the company believed might have been attributable to human factors, the safety management systems and controls referred to above are the same across all its North Sea operations. Despite this, inconsistencies in incident frequency were identified across clients and installations. For example, in 1996 some 830,000 man hours were worked across the 5 installations belonging to a single client. This work took place without incurring a single Lost Time Accident. In 1997 some 930,000 man hours were worked across the same 5 installations. In this year 11 Lost Time Accidents were incurred. Such trends are not new and have been analysed by safety professionals and industrial psychologists alike and are commonly termed the ‘safety cycle’. In order to investigate the possible root causes of these inconsistencies and develop solutions that would break the safety cycle and sustain continuous improvement, the company sought the long-term involvement of the workforce through a Safety Culture Assessment and Improvement project. The project involved the use of a newly developed Safety Climate measurement and assessment tool, combined with confidential interviews and workforce consultations as part of an overall cultural review and improvement process. The paper details the identification of the problem, the development and implementation of the processes required to investigate and solve the problem and the solutions. There is a clear demonstration of the benefits of management commitment to improving safety performance, and of workforce involvement in finding the solutions.
Wind tunnel tests were carried out to characterize the RAE 2822 supercritical airfoil and implement an active flow control technique. Tests were carried out at various subsonic and transonic Mach numbers and angles of attack. Two load cells connected to the airfoil ends along the quarter chord axis were used to quantify the aerodynamic forces acting on the airfoil. The transonic airfoil was integrated, and the control technique successfully implemented at the Florida State University Polysonic wind tunnel. The paper presents a few preliminary experimental results and describes the lessons learned during the implementation process. Oil flow visualizations revealed the presence of corner vortices on the airfoil suction surface and wedge-like patterns on the lower surface, which indicates a combination of localized regions of transitional and turbulent flow with no shocks or very weak shocks. The measured lift coefficient on the baseline airfoil is much lower than the estimated value based on literature. These results indicate that the airfoil tested need to be modified both regarding its aspect ratio and cross-sectional area to suit the facility. The active flow control technique based on co-flow jet show promise in the improvement of aerodynamic performance.
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