About the Author

Austin M. Bryan is a senior engineer for Kenexis Consulting Corpora-tion. He has been involved in numerous projects covering such diverse operations as oil and gas production, petroleum refining, and specialty chemicals. Mr. Bryan has extensive experience using risk analysis in designing engineered safeguards including fire and gas systems and safety instrumented systems. Mr. Bryan has a Master of Science in chemical engineering from Michigan Technological University. Elizabeth Smith has experience in designing both safety instrumented systems and fire and gas systems. She has been involved in projects comprising offshore and onshore upstream oil and gas, petroleum refining, and petrochemical production and shipping. She has been responsible for determining and verifying safety integrity level requirements for safety instrumented systems, as well as determining fire and gas performance targets and verifying fire and gas systems coverage. Ms. Smith utilizes risk analysis techniques to determine fire and gas hazard sources and to assess existing fire and gas system design coverage values. She also has experience in optimal placement of fire and gas detection systems that are able to achieve coverage tar-gets while minimizing equipment needs. Kevin Mitchell is vice president and a principal engineer with Kenexis. He has more than 20 years of experience in risk management, process safety, and instrumented safeguards. Mr. Mitchell has been involved in hundreds of projects covering such diverse operations as oil and gas production, petroleum refining, petrochemical, specialty chemical and general manufacturing. Mr. Mitchell specializes in state-of-the-art assessment of toxic, flammable, and explosive hazards. He is an expert in the field of safety instrumented system and fire and gas system design. He uses risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis to assist in making engineering and business decisions. Mr. Mitchell is a licensed professional engineer in the state of Ohio. He is a member of the ISA84 standards committee and the associated working group that produced the ISA technical reports on performance-based fire and gas system engineering.