Ethical issues in engineering design - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and ...

Piping and equipment
regulation. Companies are free to impose stricter requirements on the products
they make or purchase.
5.3 Clear responsibilities and tasks
The organisation of the engineering company was as follows. The company had a
matrix organisation; this meant that there was line organisation in disciplines
and horizontal organisation in project teams. Every project team consisted of
people who were also part of a line organisation. A project manager would, at the
start of a design process, consult line managers about the people he or she
wanted in the project team. If the project was large, the project team members
were relocated to work in the same space. There was a clear division of labour
and function descriptions were clear.
Job engineer: The job engineer is usually an experienced engineer. He or she is
responsible for the plant lay-out. The job engineer has to deal with constraints
related to regulation and constraints related to economy. Environmental, safety
and nuisance regulation are important in the plant lay out. For example, he or
she has to take care that safety distances between tanks and stoves and between
tanks containing certain chemicals and the outer fence of the company are taken
into account. Apparatus that produces too much noise needs to be shielded to
reduce noise levels inside and outside the installation.
Stress engineer: The stress engineer calculates the stresses in the pipes, the
stresses in the connections between pipes and vessels and the stresses the pipes
exert on the supporting structures. These calculations are made once there is a
plant lay-out. If the calculations show that stresses are too high, some changes in
the plant lay-out may have to be made. The calculations are made according to
codes. The codes used at the engineering company of the case-study are the
ASME code and the Dutch Stoomwezen Regels.
Materials engineer: The materials engineer chooses which materials are used in
an installation. Criteria used to choose materials are strength and chemical
resistance. He or she uses the ASME and American Society for Testing and
Materials (ASTM) codes and the Dutch Stoomwezen Regels.
Piping designer: The piping designer makes a three dimensional computer
model of the installation. The many elements of the computer model are preprogrammed.
The piping designer chooses between existing elements to build
the model. Once the three dimensional model is ready, simulations of people
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