Fauske & Associates

Fauske & Associates has been at the forefront of process safety innovation since the early 1980s, building a reputation as technical leaders who solve the toughest safety problems in the chemical and nuclear industries. Our people have always been our strongest asset. Our goal is to collaborate with our customers to ensure the safety and reliability of their chemical processes and industrial facilities while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Our legacy of leadership in process safety goes back to 1980 when Fauske & Associates, Inc. (FAI) was founded by Dr. Hans K. Fauske and his associates. FAI immediately became an innovative leader in improving process safety. providing expert technical guidance to the AIChE DIERS program for the chemical process industry. Our efforts led to innovative methodologies and tools to characterize reactive chemical hazards, design emergency relief systems, and simulate chemical and nuclear accidents.

FAI has been a developer and manufacturer of adiabatic calorimeters since we designed and built the original DIERS Bench Scale Apparatus (which became the VSP) in the early 1980s. Prior to the VSP, there was no calorimeter on the market that could directly simulate a runaway reaction in an adiabatic environment representative of actual process conditions. In particular, the DIERS program identified the need to have a lightweight test cell so that the thermal inertia of the test cell does not mask or dampen a chemical runaway relative to what would occur at the process scale.

The resulting VSP (later upgraded to the VSP2) was a low phi-factor (low thermal inertia) apparatus whose data can be directly scaled up without resorting to tedious computational efforts. The RSST (which became the ARSST) was subsequently developed as a simple alternative to the VSP. FAI regularly uses both of these instruments as part of our extensive contract testing and consulting work in our world-class thermal hazards testing lab, which also offers complete dust explosion and flammability testing services.

FAI is recognized worldwide for expertise in phenomenological modeling, testing, and consulting to prevent or mitigate accidents at chemical and nuclear facilities. We continue to develop practical first-principles-based software tools for simulating chemical and nuclear accidents, most recently our FERST tool for emergency relief system (ERS) design to accommodate two-phase flow and runaway chemical reactions.

In 1986 FAI aka "Fauske" became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC, and is now a Division of Stone & Webster, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Company LLC. FAI laboratories are ISO 17025 accredited.