Industrial Process Plant Safety By Collaboration of a Safety Instrumented System and a Dynamic Simulator

Industrial process plants in Japan have been seeking for the highest productivity and optimizing their processes. These plants were renovated and expanded as time passed, the plants themselves became complicated and troublesome. Few years ago, severe process plant incidents occurred in Japan. The most probable causes of these severe incidents resulted out of “incorrect operation and judgment” and “shortage of technical prediction” during exceptional manual work. Understanding the hazardous situation by risk analysis and utilizing a SIS (Safety Instrumented System) is important and effective for resolving “incorrect operation and judgment” and “shortage of technical prediction”.

The verification of the safety function hardware has established; however, the safety logic has only been verified on the desk by brainstorming or so-called “hazard and operability study (HAZOP).” Especially the determination of the criteria for the emergency shutdown is the most important, but it is not possible to confirm the criteria by try and error in an actual plant. This is different from productivity improvements. A “Dynamic Simulator” can precisely simulate behaviors of the real plant by visualizing how a hazard is diffused at various stages of a chemical reaction. The optimized safety logic design using the “Dynamic Simulator” is offered and its effectiveness is proved by verifying its behavior using a vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) plant model