{"id":61962,"date":"2012-08-17T16:41:44","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T16:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/community\/?p=2876"},"modified":"2012-08-17T16:41:44","modified_gmt":"2012-08-17T16:41:44","slug":"the-human-factor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/2012\/08\/17\/the-human-factor\/","title":{"rendered":"The Human Factor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dave Strobhar<\/p><\/div>\n

Dave Strobhar was still a student at Wright State University when the worst nuclear power accident in American history shut down the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

He had no idea that he would soon be working there.<\/p>\n

Strobhar, a Centerville native and 1976 Alter High School graduate, was studying human factors engineering at Wright State when a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant partially melted down in March 1979.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was doing some work for a local human factors company and they were doing work at Three Mile Island,\u201d Strobhar recalled. \u201cThat was the beginning, really, of a lot of human factors research outside the Department of Defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was also the beginning of Strobhar\u2019s career in human factors engineering, one that led to founding the Centerville company he still runs, Beville Engineering.<\/p>\n

The Air Force pioneered human factors research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to enable pilots and other personnel to manage ever more complex machines and systems. Wright State has supported that work with a strong human factors engineering program. The university\u2019s Department of Biomedical, Industrial, and Human Factors Engineering (BIE) is the only academic unit nationally to share programs in these disciplines.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When he graduated in 1980, Strobhar began working at GPU Nuclear, owner of the Three Mile Island plant, analyzing the accident.<\/p>\n

In studying the human factors issues in the Three Mile Island accident, Strobhar recognized a need for human factors engineering in other industrial plants with complex process controls, especially oil refineries and chemical plants.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou have these very complex, hazardous plants, and there are people at the controls just like there are people at the controls of an aircraft. If they make a mistake, the crash is more figurative than literal, but it can have some very devastating consequences,\u201d Strobhar said.<\/p>\n

At the same time, Three Mile Island brought nuclear power plant construction to a stop in the United States. Noting the similarity of human factors issues between nuclear plants and oil and chemical plants, Strobhar decided to focus his engineering efforts on that area.<\/p>\n

He returned to Centerville for a short stint with a small engineering firm, and then decided to start his own company.<\/p>\n

\u201cI gave myself six months to find out if there was a demand for my services, and after six months it seemed that there was. Within a couple of months after that I got my first project, and some 28 years later I\u2019m still doing it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Beville Engineering is a small firm with just five employees, but Strobhar said most of its clients are large companies. \u201cMost of our clients are Fortune 50 companies. They are the BPs, the Shells, Conoco Phillips, Exxon Mobil. All the majors,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s work focuses on operator interfaces, such as alarms and displays, and operator workload and staffing. \u201cCompanies are trying to walk this line of being as competitive as they can and as efficient as they can, but ensure they have enough people that they can operate safely and in an environmentally friendly way to the communities that they\u2019re in,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

With clients in all parts of the country, Strobhar said the Dayton area is as good a location as any for his company. \u201cWe\u2019ve got major projects right now in Edmonton, Alberta; Billings, Montana; and Bismarck, North Dakota,\u201d he said. \u201cSo the only requirement is access to an airport that can get you to these places.\u201d<\/p>\n

But staying near Wright State has enabled Strobhar to leverage its academic resources to help the oil and chemical industry.<\/p>\n

Strobhar said companies recognized a common need for information on which to base new safety standards. \u201cDecisions were being made in a vacuum,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

As a member of the external advisory board for Wright State\u2019s College of Engineering and Computer Science, Strobhar approached S. Narayanan, Ph.D., dean of the college. They put together a plan that led to the opening of the Center for Operator Performance in 2007 as an alliance of academic and process companies to research issues facing the petrochemical industry in the area of human factors and operator performance.<\/p>\n

Strobhar said several oil companies and large computer suppliers fund the center\u2019s operations and research projects. Wright State has done some of the research, but projects have also been done by Louisiana, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania state universities, and private companies have done some as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWright State has a strong human factors presence, and so that helps in terms of gaining access to resources,\u201d Strobhar said. \u201cWright State either has people who can do the work, or they know who can do the work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Center for Operator Performance \u201cis really doing some groundbreaking work,\u201d Strobhar said. \u201cIt is getting some high visibility within the industry. It is developing some very significant safety-related finding, so it has the potential to dramatically improve the safety of these plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strobhar credited Wright State for recognizing the importance of the center and stepping up to the challenge of creating it with industry support.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt required not just the operating companies wanting to do this, but we had to have an institution that was ready and able to support it. Wright State stepped forward and said, \u2018We\u2019d love to host this.\u2019 Had we been located anywhere else, I don\u2019t know whether the center would\u2019ve ever been formed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dave Strobhar was still a student at Wright State University when the worst nuclear power accident in American history shut down the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. He had no idea that he would soon be working there. Strobhar, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":60262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4827,715],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-magazine","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webapp2.wright.edu\/web1\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}