Risk assessment of past exposure in forensic engineering

For the reconstruction of past exposures are often not available measures or, when available, they are inaccurate and do not cover the entire period of interest; the reliability of the measures is a crucial point because in a working environment the concentration of a pollutant is not uniform and is not constant in time. Starting from a suitable set of measures carried out in a given period inside an existing plant, it is possible to estimate past exposures by applying a simple model that takes into account three fundamental parameters: process productivity, protection and mitigation systems and technology in use. The proposed methodology has been applied to a case-study; in particular an industrial process for the production of carbon-based electrodes has been analyzed and the workers exposure to PAH has been considered. A good agreement between experimental measures and model predictions has been evidenced, thus confirming the feasibility and effectiveness of this methodology.