Equipment‐based route index of inherent safety

Abstract

Process safety concept is used to deal with accident scenarios occurring as a result of loss containment. There are four tactics of process safety, and due to superior characteristics, the inherent theme is given priority at the preliminary design stage. In open literature, various methods have been proposed to identify the inherent safety level, and among these indexing methods are typically used. The reported indices have a shortcoming that these have not considered equipment characteristics for inherent safety assessment. Therefore, a new indexing method is proposed in this article to improve the quantification of inherent safety level. This index incorporates process, chemical, and equipment aspects to define the safety level of various process routes via the relative ranking. The proposed index has been tested on process routes to produce methyl methacrylate, which confirms the applicability of this index. The index would enable the practitioners to thoroughly analyze and compare the process routes to identify the inherently safer route.

Sustainable process design for heat exchanger network considering inherent safety and process economics

“…In the recent literature, several methods have been applied to consider equipment characteristics for sustainable process design of individual equipment [41][42][43] and process route selection. [44,45] The PSI method mentioned above has been integrated with process economics with risk assessment for fire scenarios while missing the factor of equipment characteristics. [46] The equipment aspect in process piping has been recently considered along with the safety and cost aspects.…”

A Knowledge-Driven Model to Assess Inherent Safety in Process Infrastructure

“…The first index, the Prototype index of inherent safety (PIIS), was introduced by Edwards et al (1993) [21] to rank the degree of inherent safety related to the process paths. Some other recently proposed IBMs include an index proposed by Athar et al (2020) [22] entitled the equipmentbased intrinsic safety index (EBISI), which is a new method for improving the computation of inherent safety using factors such as process aspects, chemicals, and equipment. Shariff et al (2018) [23] introduced a new index-based method for the inherently safe design of distillation columns in the initial design stage, which included process and distillation indices in each group, considering different parameters.…”

“…On the other hand, some scientific studies have been conducted to develop the criteria for these indicators so the accuracy and sensitivity of these methods could be more apparent. The variation in the indicators is due to the differences in the calculations of the indicators and how they are combined to obtain a general index so that a method can provide more realistic results if more indicators are considered [22].…”