Assessment of inherently safer alternatives in biogas production and upgrading

Abstract

Biogas is becoming an increasingly important resource of energy production from biomass, and a number of alternative technologies are proposed for its production and upgrading. However, in spite of the increasing number of accidents recorded, scarce attention was dedicated to date to the control and mitigation of biogas hazards. In this study, inherent safety of biogas technologies was addressed. A method for the selection of inherently safer alternatives during early design stages was further developed and combined to a Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis, accounting for uncertainty of input parameters and addressing the robustness of the ranking provided. The method was applied to the assessment of several alternative reference process schemes for biogas production and upgrading. The results allowed the identification of critical safety issues and the ranking of inherently safer solutions.

A novel hazard assessment method for biomass gasification stations based on extended set pair analysis

“…Each sample is set as the variable sample in turn, and data of the variable sample in each index are set as the variable inputs, then outputs, i.e., the CI and ED are calculated with different input values. Assuming an error of ±10% in the inputs determined [ 18 ], that is to say, the range of input values is between 90% and 110% of the reference values presented in Table 3 . Herein, the interval of input values is set as 1%.…”

“…As general terms of methods for the evaluation of hazards, hazard assessment is practical and effective in the safety management for accident hazards. Kinds of methods are involved in the hazard assessment which is also called the risk assessment, including risk assessment methods based on indices [ 17 , 18 ], fuzzy methods [ 19 ], analytic hierarchy process (AHP) [ 20 ], set pair analysis (SPA) [ 21 ], etc . In particular, SPA is a practical method which was proposed by a Chinese scholar to make a comprehensive analysis of certain and uncertain information [ 22 ].…”

“…In contrast, six biomass gasification stations are made hazard assessment by GSPA as well [ 42 ], and the availability and validity of ESPA for the hazard assessment are proved by comparison results. For a given evaluation model, the sensitivity analysis is an effective method to observe the variation of outputs when some inputs are varied, and the reasonability of the evaluation model will be verified based on the variation trend of outputs [ 18 , 43 , 44 ]. Therefore, the sensitivity analysis is introduced to check the consistency of hazard assessment results obtained by ESPA and GSPA so that the reasonability of ESPA can be justified.…”

A Novel Evaluation System of Psoriasis Curative Effect Based on Bayesian Maximum Entropy Weight Self-Learning and Extended Set Pair Analysis

“…Each patient was set as the variable sample in turn, and data in each index were set as the variable inputs. Assuming an error of ±10% in the inputs determined, that is to say, the range of input values was between 90% and 110% of the reference values [24]. Herein, the interval of input values was set as 1%.…”

Inherently safe and economically optimal design using multi-objective optimization: The case of a refrigeration cycle

“…The numerical descriptive inherent safety technique (NuDIST) 107 for flammability score calculation was used in this research. Scarponi et al (2016) proposed a 108 methodology for the selection of inherently safer biogas technology during early design stages. 109…”