European safety campaign aims to transform brazing risks
The HVCA is one of the partners supporting a Europe-wide campaign to dramatically reduce the number of accidents and injuries caused by brazing and other joining tasks using flammable gases.
More than 1,000 small businesses that use brazing across a range of industries are part of the Safeflame campaign. Brazing is thought to account for 125,000 jobs in Europe and is worth €20bn.
Currently brazing and many other flame processes use highly flammable bottled gases such as acetylene and propane contained in high pressure cylinders - this has clear inherent risks.
Accidents
The SafeFlame technology has three features that bring major safety improvements to the sector, decreasing the risk of accidents and the cost of insuring operators, buildings and transportation vehicles.
Each year in the EU there are hundreds of serious incidents involving bottled gases such as acetylene, propane and oxygen. These gases are routinely used in more than 100,000 individual applications involving manual hand torches for welding, cutting and brazing of items such as refrigeration and air conditioning plant.
UK fire and rescue services attend about 100 incidents every year in which acetylene cylinders have been involved in a fire. Those cylinders known to have failed catastrophically generally split axially and fragment into several pieces. The shrapnel can travel more than 200 metres propelled by their burning gas. It can also penetrate masonry and container walls.
Because of these obvious safety concerns, the cost of insuring operators and vehicles transporting bottled gases can be prohibitively high. The SafeFlame EU project aims to transform the costs and risks associated with this work.
