Any threat to personal safety should be regarded as a hazard and treated as such. This article discusses threats from several sources, such as kinematic/mechanical hazards, electrical hazards, energy hazards, human factors/ergonomic hazards, and environmental hazards. It describes hazard analysis in terms of failure modes and effects analysis, failure modes and criticality analysis, fault tree analysis, fault hazard analysis, and operating hazards analysis. The article examines fail-safe designs, such as fail-passive designs, fail-active designs, and fail-operational designs. It also provides information on various types of warnings, such as visual warning, auditory warnings, olfactory warnings, tactile warnings, and tastable warnings.

This article discusses the safety issues associated with the design and operation of thermal spray booths and spray box structures and the equipment or systems required for operating thermal spray processes. It describes the design elements necessary to mitigate sound, dust and fume, ultraviolet light, and mechanical hazards. The means selected for safeguarding personnel must be based on a formal risk assessment that meets ANSI/RIA standards. The safeguards include sensing devices, barriers, awareness signals, procedures, and training. It also provides guidelines that are intended to increase the safety awareness and the use of safety practices for gas and liquid piping and electrical equipment within thermal spray installations.

This article provides an overview of surface contaminants that may affect the heat treatment processes and end-product quality. It presents information on the chemicals used to clean different surface contaminants of steels. The article discusses three types of cleaning methods, namely, mechanical, chemical, and electrochemical and their effectiveness and applicability. The mechanical cleaning methods include grinding, brushing, steam or flame jet cleaning, abrasive blasting, and tumbling. Solvent cleaning, emulsion cleaning, alkaline cleaning, acid cleaning, pickling, and descaling are chemical cleaning methods. The electrochemical cleaning methods include electropolishing, electrolytic alkaline cleaning, and electrolytic pickling. The article provides information on cleanliness measurement methods such as qualitative tests and quantitative tests to ensure product quality. Health hazards that may be associated with each cleaning method and the general control measures to be used for each hazard are tabulated.

This article provides an overview of the fundamentals, mechanisms, process physics, advantages, and limitations of laser beam welding. It describes the independent and dependent process variables in view of their role in procedure development and process selection. The article includes information on independent process variables such as incident laser beam power and diameter, laser beam spatial distribution, traverse speed, shielding gas, depth of focus and focal position, weld design, and gap size. Dependent variables, including depth of penetration, microstructure and mechanical properties of laser-welded joints, and weld pool geometry, are discussed. The article also reviews the various injuries and electrical and chemical hazards associated with laser beam welding.

This article discusses three types of powder-feeder systems that are commonly used throughout the thermal spray (TS) industry: gravity-based devices, rotating wheel devices, and fluidized-bed systems. It provides information on the various mechanical methods for producing powders, namely, crushing, milling, attriting, and machining. The article describes two prime methods of agglomeration. One method uses a binder by way of agglutination, while the other relies on a sintering operation. The article discusses the technology and principles of the processes that relate to thermal spraying, and offers an understanding for choosing particular feedstock materials that are classified based on the thermal spray process, material morphology, chemical nature of the material, and applications. Sieving, the most common method of separating powders into their size fractions, is also reviewed. The article also provides information on the topical areas and precautions to be undertaken to protect the operator from safety hazards.

Uranium is a moderately strong and ductile metal that can be cast, formed, and welded by a variety of standard methods. This article presents an overview of the processing and properties of uranium and uranium alloys with a brief overview of the principal hazards and precautions associated with processing depleted uranium and methods to control mild radioactivity, chemical toxicity, and pyrophoricity. It also describes the classification and heat treatment of uranium and uranium alloys. Furthermore, the article provides graphical representation of the effect of alloy composition, cooling rate, and aging temperature on microstructure, crystal structure, and mechanical properties of uranium and uranium alloys.

This article presents an overview of the rules, regulations, and techniques implemented to minimize the safety hazards associated with welding, cutting, and allied processes. Safety management, protection of the work area, process-specific safety considerations, and robotic and electrical safety are discussed. The article explains the use of personal protective equipment and provides information on protection against fumes, gases, and electromagnetic radiation. It concludes with a discussion on safe handling of compressed gases as well as the prevention and protection of fire and explosion.

Health and safety are critically important issues, and there are numerous aspects of the production and use of metal powders that may entail exposure to hazardous conditions. This article provides a discussion on the issues associated with the safe production and handling of metal powders and the safe operation of continuous mesh belt sintering furnaces with combustible atmospheres. It also provides a comprehensive high-level overview of the safety-related issues and concerns related to the use of compacting presses in the manufacturing sector.

Risk and hazard analysis can be effectively used during design reviews to provide valuable feedback to the design to avoid failures. This article discusses the types of risks, namely, real risk, statistical risk, predicted risk, and perceived risk. It describes the principle and technical methods of risk/hazard analysis practiced in the industry to identify possible hazards and the resources necessary to avoid or reduce risks. These methods include the failure mode and effect analysis, fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, risk/benefit analysis, safety analysis, and probabilistic estimates.

During metal powder production, powder and/or dust handling, compaction, and part finishing operations, many safety and environmental risks exist. This article is a detailed account of the types of safety hazards that can exist and the issues that occur during metal powder handling, as well as recommendations and strategies that can be employed to both prevent and protect against damaging effects from powder exposure, fire and/or explosions, or environmental impact events.

This article discusses the three legal theories on which a products liability lawsuit is based and the issues of hazard, risk, and danger in the context of liability. It describes manufacturing and design defects of various products. The article explains a design that is analyzed from the human factors viewpoint and details the preventive measures of the defects, with examples. It presents four paramount questions relating to the probability of injury which are asked even when one executes all possible preventive measures carefully and thoroughly.

This article provides an overview of the concepts of environmental, health, and safety (EH&S) risk incidents, then discusses these concepts relative to additive manufacturing (AM): the multiple intrants, process parameters, and equipment, as well as the resulting products and wastes. The article discusses additive manufacturing hazards, which are broken down into material hazards, equipment/process hazards, and facility hazards. The environmental impact of AM and the development of EH&S standards for AM also are covered in the article.

This article provides a background to the biological evaluation of medical devices. It discusses what the ISO 10993 standards require for polymeric biomaterials and presents examples of qualitative and quantitative tests that can be used to satisfy these requirements. The article describes infrared (IR) and thermal analyses that are used extensively to fingerprint polymeric materials. It also presents a discussion on the chemical characterization and risk assessment of extracts. Background information on risk assessments of extracts is also included. The four basic steps that are commonly used in the risk assessment process are discussed. These include hazard identification, dose-response assessment, and exposure assessment, and risk characterization.