Development and testing of a safety module for diagnostics and protection from hazards in secondary woodworking machinery

The main theme covered by this dissertation is safety, set in the context of automatic machinery for secondary woodworking. The thesis describes in detail the project of a software module for CNC machining centers to protect the operator against hazards and to report errors in the machine safety management. Its design has been developed during an internship at SCM Group technical department. The development of the safety module is addressed step by step in a detailed way: first the company and the reference framework are introduced and then all the design choices are explained and justified. The discussion begins with a detailed analysis of the standards concerning woodworking machines and safety-related software. In this way, a clear and linear procedure can be established to develop and implement the internal structure of the module, its interface, and its application to specific safety-critical conditions. Afterwards, particular attention is paid to software testing, with the development of a comprehensive test procedure for the module, and to diagnostics, especially oriented towards signal management in IoT mode. Finally, the safety module is used as an anti-regression tool to initiate a design improvement of the machine control program. The refactoring steps performed in the process are explained in detail and the SCENT approach is introduced to test the result.

A framework for the environmental risk assessment of offshore carbon storage in CCS systems

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) represents an interesting climate mitigation option, however, as for any other human activity, there is the impelling need to assess and manage the associated risks. This study specifically addresses the marine environmental risk posed by CO2 leakages associated to CCS subsea engineering system, meant as offshore pipelines and injection / plugged and abandoned wells. The aim of this thesis work is to start approaching the development of a complete and standardized practical procedure to perform a quantified environmental risk assessment for CCS, with reference to the specific activities mentioned above. Such an effort would be of extreme relevance not only for companies willing to implement CCS, as a methodological guidance, but also, by uniformizing the ERA procedure, to begin changing people’s perception about CCS, that happens to be often discredited due to the evident lack of comprehensive and systematic methods to assess the impacts on the marine environment. The backbone structure of the framework developed consists on the integration of ERA’s main steps and those belonging to the quantified risk assessment (QRA), in the aim of quantitatively characterizing risk and describing it as a combination of magnitude of the consequences and their frequency. The framework developed by this work is, however, at a high level, as not every single aspect has been dealt with in the required detail. Thus, several alternative options are presented to be considered for use depending on the situation. Further specific studies should address their accuracy and efficiency and solve the knowledge gaps emerged, in order to establish and validate a final and complete procedure. Regardless of the knowledge gaps and uncertainties, that surely need to be addressed, this preliminary framework already finds some relevance in on field applications, as a non-stringent guidance to perform CCS ERA, and it constitutes the foundation of the final framework.