Methodologies for Assessing Risks of Accidents in Chemical Process Industries
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TECHNICAL ARTICLE—PEER-REVIEWED
Methodologies for Assessing Risks of Accidents in Chemical Process Industries Arafat Basheer . S. M. Tauseef . Tasneem Abbasi . S. A. Abbasi
Submitted: 29 October 2018 ASM International 2019
Abstract Chemical process industries often handle, store and transport chemicals which are flammable and/or toxic. Also, often, processes are employed which are carried out at high temperatures of pressures. These happenings constitute major hazards which carry the risk of serious accidents. The bigger the hazard, the greater is the risk associated with its existence. Despite the best intentions of the industries not to allow any accident to occur, major accidents keep occurring all over the world. This makes it necessary to develop newer methods with which the likelihood of accidents can be forecast and steps taken to prevent those accidents from occurring. This paper presents an overview of the already developed, and still evolving, methods for assessing risk of accidents in chemical process industries. Keywords Risk assessment Fault tree analysis HAZOP FMEA LOPA Networks
A. Basheer T. Abbasi S. A. Abbasi (&) Centre for Pollution Control and Environmental Engineering, Pondicherry University, Chinnakalapet, Puducherry 605 014, India e-mail: [email protected] A. Basheer Department of Civil Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Srinagar, Srinagar 190006, India S. M. Tauseef Department of Health, Safety, Environment and Civil Engineering, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun 248 007, India
Introduction The Bhopal gas leak disaster of 1984 killed or maimed over 20,000 persons [2, 89]. The after effects of the disaster—in terms of toxic impacts (such as birth defects) passing on to successive generations—and the very serious contamination of a large area are continuing to be felt even as 33 years have passed. A few months prior to the Bhopal tragedy, a leak of liquefied petroleum gas occurring in a storage facility in Mexico had triggered a cascade of explosions and fires that not only destroyed the facility but also much of the nearby town [1, 5]. The BPL refinery disaster of 2005 is believed to have caused more harm to the environment than any other process industry disaster [3]. Each of those major accidents has caused losses worth billions of rupees. Between Bhopal and BPL, and before it and since, similarly catastrophic accidents have kept occurring. The main reason is that even as the science of accident forecasting and prevention has been advancing, so has been the number of hazardous chemicals and processes. Simultaneously, the quantities of hazardous chemicals being transported, stored and used are increasing. Yet another factor is increasing global population, especially in the developing countries. In ever more cases, hazardous installations which were earlier situated in remote, thinly populated areas now have residential and commercial activates moved in all around them, almost pressuring upon the boundary walls of the industries. This ha
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