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At Lacamas, safety is at the very core of our activities. One of the first steps in developing safe chemical processes for plant operation is to identify and address any intrinsic process safety issues. For example, some chemical reactions highly exothermic, some reagents and bi-products are highly toxic some processes evolve large volumes of gases. In the worst scenarios, some chemical reactions and / or reagents are highly energetic, and under conspiring process conditions, can decompose explosively (detonate).
Our chemists and engineers are trained to identify both chemical and operational hazards. Process Hazards Reviews (PHA) are part of our development approach where we systematically pull the process apart and identify all possible hazards and safety concerns. The findings and actions from these meetings may trigger specific control experiments in our R&D department, or modifications to the equipment set up and configuration.
For certain materials with suspected energetic functionality, we use Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) as a preliminary screening tool for instability. If necessary we will carry out a more in depth study of the system using more refined calorimetric experiments such as ARC and RC1 (outsourced).