Risk-based interventions for safer operation of a hydrogen station

Abstract

In ensuring safety of plant operation, both the reliability of plant components and human resources are important. Moving towards optimising resources, there is a need to prioritise intervention measures such as maintenance program and review of standard operating procedures. In this paper, a technique known as basic event ranking approach (BERA) is applied to a hydrogen station. BERA examines the relative importance of plant components based on their probability of failure within the realm of fault tree analysis model, and yields values of importance index for each basic event investigated. To incorporate changes in reliability data throughout the plant lifetime, a dynamic extension to BERA is introduced. The vulnerability of plant components and human actions are ranked with respect to the selected top events of fault trees generated from plant functions. The results revealed the potential of BERA to facilitate risk-based intervention initiatives to support process safety.