(584w) Inherent Safety Assessment in Natural Gas Liquefaction Process

The natural gas liquefaction process is typically divided as cascade processes and mixed refrigerant (MR) process according the cooling methodology. Both processes uses the refrigerant to cool down the natural gas, which traditionally consists of mixture of hydrocarbon. However, the hydrocarbon has a potential risk of a flammability. Thus there has been some approach to change the refrigerant from hydrocarbon to nonflammable refrigerant. N₂O is a nonflammable and nontoxic material which can be used as a refrigerant to overcome the safety problem of the liquefaction process which is particularly important in offshore platform. The aim of this study is to compare the inherent safeness of the liquefaction process for the conventional hydrocarbons and N₂O by using inherent safety index. Using the inherent safety index enables to quantitatively assess the safeness of the both processes, and further can be extensively applied to the other chemical processes.