Process Safety Technical Areas

Combustion of biomass is becoming an increasingly important energy source. This is especially true for wood pellets, as several power companies have decided to use this fuel instead of coal. In this process the wood pellets are ground in big mills and, from there, pneumatically transported to the...

At first glance it may seem that organizational culture is subjective and therefore difficult to measure. Indeed, even the definition of culture falls into the soft side of process safety. This paper will show that an objective approach can be taken to survey and define process safety culture. With...

LOPA, as a semi-quantitative analysis, often provides inconsistent results. This can be due to physical differences between units but often it is due to team's perceptual differences. Initiating event frequency evaluation using guidance tables is more consistent than consequence evaluation where...

A Cabot team used the ISA 84-2004 (IEC61511-1) standard to evaluate the Safety Instrumented System (SIS) for an existing fumed silica burner and made design changes to reduce the risk. Years prior to this initiative, the layers of protection review used was subjective and resulted in assigning...

In recent years Process Safety Engineers have promoted the use of HAZOP to identify hazards and assess safeguards, followed by LOPA to identify if additional protection layers are necessary and, if they are to be provided using safety instrumented functions, how reliable the SIFs need to be...

Distillation is one of the most common unit operations in the chemical processing industry. Using relative volatility as a means of separating chemicals involves adding large amounts of energy to the system at the base of the column, typically through the use of a reboiler, and then removing that...

A recent explosion occurred in a single burner, recirculating solids ring dryer. No one was reported injured as a result of the explosion, however the explosion caused significant damage to the dryer and minor damage to sections of the facility. Despite the dryer having been designed with seven...

With the increasing use of Layer of Protection Analysis as a semi-quantitative method of assessing process risk, LOPA practitioners are asked to assign credit to numerous safeguards including relief devices. Relief devices are only as strong as the initial design of the component and the systems...

Thermal insulation is used in chemical plants primarily as a tool to prevent energy loss. However, if installed properly, an added benefit is that of allowing the use of smaller relief valves when designing relief systems in the fire case. The study described in this report was initiated to...