(55r) Application of Inherently Safer Design Tool (i-SDT) for Hazards Assessment and Safer Operation

Inherently Safer Design Tool (i-SDT) is a newly developed semi-quantitative metrics for hazards identification and characterization¹. It is built on property platform, probabilistic analysis of historical accidents information and characteristic equations of safety parameters (i.e., flammability, toxicity, explosiveness, reactivity, etc.) which are developed in-house to assess potential hazards under various operating conditions. Designers can identify dangerous components and vulnerable equipment of the investigated industrial process and can take necessary corrective actions by applying the inherent safety principles² (e.g., minimization, substitution, moderation and simplification). The final output of this i-SDT tool is a cluster safety parameter score (C_SP) which provides insights regarding the development of safe design and operational parameters to manage the hazards using a very limited amount of process information and safety incidents information.

In this work, the application of the proposed i-SDT tool is explained for assessing different alternative routes of an industrial process supply chain. The proposed i-SDT safety metric identifies the chemical components with highest risk and the major accident-prone operational units. The detail analysis using i-SDT tools shows how different operating conditions can affect the safety performance of the given process. The ultimate object is to find the safer route while considering the techno-economic and environmental performance. It provides Pareto curve to compare alternative routes and gives the freedom to the end-users choosing their safer operating route/technology and process conditions. Therefore, safety can be considered as an important selection criteria for choosing best alternative from the beginning.

Final cluster safety parameter scores (C_SP) obtained from the analysis enables designers to compare between available technologies and provides information on various hazardous situations. It can also provide in depth knowledge regarding the cause behind the hazardous behavior. The proposed i-SDT metrics allows designer to do the safety analysis simultaneously while doing the initial process synthesis which will reduce the future modification cost of any add-in safety features. This work shows how the unique features of i-SDT tool can be applied in a real life scenario while doing inherent safer design during early stage of design.

1. Kazi, M.–K, Eljack F. T., & AlNouss, A. Application of a property-based inherent safety quantification framework for integrating risk assessment into process safety life cycle. AIChE Spring Meeting, Orlando, Florida, USA, 2018. (156c), p. 2260.

2. Kletz, T. A., & Amyotte, P. (2010). Process Plants: A Handbook for Inherently Safer Design, Second Edition: Taylor & Francis.