DSS122: Ask Me Anything on Combustible Dust Safety in Australia & New Zealand with Dr. Chris Bloore & Dr. Jim Munro-Part 1

In today’s episode, we have a replay of an Ask Me Anything session inside the Dust Safety Academy, this one focused on combustible dust safety in Australia and New Zealand. Dr. Chris Bloore, who has spent the last 30 years as a combustible dust safety consultant with clients around the world, and Dr. Jim Munro, Managing Director at Jim Munro International Compliance Ltd., co-hosted the session and answered listener questions.

What Regulations Apply to Combustible Dust in Australia and New Zealand?

Jim explained that Australia is a commonwealth of states and most states run their own legal systems. Enabling legislation has to be done in each state.

“What we do have in Australia is our standards development, which is often done in conjunction with New Zealand,” he says. “So we get into this AS 3000 which we call Wiring Rules. Each state does call that document up into law in various ways. Within that standard, it includes references to relevant Australia and New Zealand hazardous standards – these standards, adoption devices, and more recently ISO and IECEx standards. So that’s a rather convoluted way that we end up with regulations for the above-ground industry.”

The coal mining industry has its own regulations. New South Wales and Queensland have very specific regulations for coal mines.

“To the best of my knowledge, those regulations are quite different,” Jim says. “But that just shows how independent we like to be in our states in Australia.”

Chris said that New Zealand has a governing law called the Health and Safety at Work Act. It also references the IECEx standards and the AS/NZS 4745 code of practice for handling combustible dust is the overarching combustible dust standard for both countries.

“But it’s technically a code of practice,” he says. “Its role is advisory- it’s not prescriptive.”

There is an approved code of practice for the prevention, detection and control of fire and explosion in the New Zealand dairy industry spray drying plant. It is the only publicly available code of practice for that sort of safety in spray drying, and as such, has been the subject of some interest from overseas multinational companies looking at any changes the New Zealand industry might have with regard to explosion safety practices.

“Since one of the major areas in which we’ve been getting combustible dust explosions over the years has been the dairy industry, that was quite important that we became leaders in that, because we’ve produced a very large amount of milk powder in New Zealand,” Chris says.

He pointed out that keeping up with the standards can be difficult.

“The timetable for the recycling of standards is idiosyncratic at the best of times. And there’s the other problem is the harmonization or lack thereof between the EN standards out of Europe and the NFPA standards out of North America. It hasn’t been helped by the fact that the US NFPA standards generally start out from the laws of physics and the EN standards start out from thousands of full-scale tests carried out in Germany and Norway and places like that. So there has been a kind of an empirical approach from one end and a very theoretical on the other. And they are slowly coming together by adopting a risk-based approach.”

JIm said that in Australia, the most significant dust-related standard is IEC 60079-31, which has been known by various things, including DIP (dust-excluding ignition proof) It is a standard that ensures that dust cannot enter equipment.

“We also allow a number of other techniques that have come from the world of explosive gases and vapours. So we have, for example, intrinsic safety where you have to keep the energy very low. IEC 60079-11 is the main one. It’s also possible to use pressurization, which is IEC 60079-2.”

What are the Combustible Dust Challenges in Dairy and Milk Powder Industries?

According to Chris, the New Zealand dairy industry was once a focus of attention due to the significant number of explosions. Dairy companies now have standard operating procedures covering dust exposure and safety in terms of equipment design and operation of the equipment. For maintenance and construction activities, they have job safety area assessments.

“Our plants are now all protected by either explosion vents or explosion suppression equipment or both, and chemical isolation using pressurized cylinders of powder suppressant for isolating different parts of the equipment from each other. They are also all fitted with water deluge systems that can flood the plant with water to extinguish fires.”

Conclusion

“Some of the other challenges we’ve got are keeping the desire of companies to have a cheap solution faced up against the need to have a safe solution,” Chris says. “I have, over the years, been asked to do the calculations for picking the cheapest solution. I’ve got some difficulties with that, and I think what we need is the safer solution.”

If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Chris Bloore and Jim Munro directly:

Email: [email protected] , [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbloore/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmunrointernational/

If you have questions about the contents of this or any other podcast episode, you can go to our ‘Questions from the Community’ page and submit a text message or video recording. We will then bring someone on to answer these questions in a future episode.