This course covers the process safety hazards associated with runaway chemical reactions. Several significant incidents are presented to introduce the concerns/hazards, which leads to a detailed presentation on the process safety information required to analyze these potential hazards followed by in-depth discussion of inherently safer methods, design methods, and layers of protection commonly applied to eliminate, prevent the occurrence, and mitigate the impact of runaway reaction incidents. The specialized considerations for overpressure system design for potential runaway reactors is introduced. A significant industrial runaway reactor incident is used to illustrate these concepts.
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Unit 1
- Describe several runaway reactor process safety incidents
- Identify common causes of this class of incident
- Relate these causes to the Center for Chemical Process Safety Risk Based Process Safety management system elements.
Unit 2
- List the key questions to ask and data needed to characterize an exothermic reaction
- Describe reactor calorimetry experiments
- Use reactor calorimetry data to characterize the reaction.
Unit 3
- Elimination and Prevention of Runaway Reaction Hazards
- Consideration of Inherently Safer Options
- Design for Process Safety Layers of Protection
Unit 4
- Identify key factors that influence the relief system design
- Identify important factors in determining the reactive relief load
- Classify the phase of a runaway reactor’s contents
- Describe the general process of designing a relief valve for a vessel with the potential for a runaway reaction
- Recognize the need for good hazard identification, good process safety information, and good analysis of potential risk scenarios to design safeguards to prevent and mitigate runaway reaction hazards.
This course is designed to be of interest to those students (undergraduate and graduate) as well as new professionals, who have had previous exposure to process safety fundaments and reactor kinetics/design. This course builds other related SACHE courses, primarily those dealing with reactive hazards (ELA962) and pressure relief systems (ELA971). This course provides a baseline understanding for those students who wish to pursue more extensive and detailed study of the hazards associated with runaway reactions.
- Unit 1: Review of Reactor Runaway Process Safety Incidents
- Unit 2: Characterization of Reactor Systems with the Potential for Runaway Events;
- Unit 3: Elimination and Prevention of Runaway Reaction Hazards; and
- Unit 4: Design of Overpressure Relief Systems.
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