IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019 - 11

2019 Ieee medAls

IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies
Sponsored by Toyota Motor Corporation

Richard Nute, D. Ray Corson,
and Jim Barrick
For contributions to hazard-based safety engineering as the basis
for product design and product safety standard development

he creation of an engineering-based systematic process
for predicting how energy flow can cause injury and for
developing safeguards to prevent such injury by Richard
Nute, D. Ray Corson, and Jim Barrick, has taken safety standards
to a new level and resulted in the development of safer products
to protect people around the world. Originally developed by the
trio as an internal course for engineers at Hewlett-Packard, what
is now known as Hazard-Based Safety Engineering (HBSE) is
based on a three-block model for injury: energy source-energy
transfer-body injury. Nute, Corson, and Barrick extended this
model to describe methods of energy flow from an energy source
through some transfer mechanism into the human body, which
allows safety engineers to determine the necessary characteristics of the transfer mechanism (the "safeguard") to suﬃciently
block or attenuate the energy transfer so that there is no injury.
Nute, Corson, and Barrick went on to teach HBSE to engineers
at other companies and around the world. Whereas traditional
product safety standards were predicated on preventing the re-

currence of past safety incidents, HBSE allows for predicting a
safe product design. HBSE principles, when implemented during the product design cycle, allow designers to have substantially
increased confidence that their design will result in a safe product
and that the costs related to the safety design will be reasonable.
The HBSE coursework includes evaluation and experimentation
with electrical, thermal burn, and electrically caused fire hazards
and is also applicable to the protection of sensitive infrastructure
and facilities.
An IEEE Life Fellow and recipient of the International Electrotechnical Commission's 1906 Award (2007), Nute is currently
a product safety consultant residing in Bend, OR, USA.
Recipient of the International Electrotechnical Commission's
1906 Award (2006), Corson is president of Queritas Consulting,
Loveland, CO, USA.
Barrick is a senior manager with Western Digital, Milipitas,
CA, USA.

Scope: For outstanding accomplishments in the application of technology in the fields of interest of IEEE that improve the environment
and/or public safety.

11 | 2019 IEEE awards bookLET

IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019

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