A heuristic framework for process safety assessment during research and development design stage

Abstract

Process safety assessment is one of the most powerful approaches that can be used to communicate the strategies of hazard identification as well as risk assessment in the chemical process industry. Process safety has been introduced decades ago. Its importance and needs have become more obvious due to the constant increase of plant operation scales in the process industries. The increasing scale of process plant can be especially dangerous due to the presence of additional or higher magnitude of hazards. Between years 1996 and 2014, study shows that there are various methods that have been developed for the assessment of process safety including qualitative, quantitative as well as the combination of both. Despite the availability of an enormous number of methods, there is no detailed guideline on how to select which is the most suitable one that suits the scope, nature, interest and constraint of the assessment. This has led to slow adoption of detailed assessment (especially inherent safety) among industries, which based on the survey, have responded that too complicated methods have discouraged them from using the available methods. This is especially critical during the process design phase since not much information is already available. The best time to apply process hazard analysis is during research and development (R&D) design phase due to cost and time constraint. The main purpose of this study is to develop a framework for safety assessment in the R&D design phase of chemical processes. The framework was developed based on two aspects - (i) the methods screened to be suitable to be included in the framework and (ii) the specific stages in the design phase itself. This is important since different stage offers different type and amount of process information. Different method also requires a different type of information for the assessment. A simple case study is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework.