Development of a friendlier chemical process framework using the inherent safety concept / Gao Xiaoming
To date, inherent safety concept has been regarded as the most robust solution for risk management and loss prevention in chemical processes. Its proactive interventions of building safety measures into the process design schemes can avoid adding extensive end-of-pipe protections when the process...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Published: |
2022
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15684/1/Gao_Xiaoming.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15684/2/Gao_Xiaoming.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/15684/ |
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| Summary: | To date, inherent safety concept has been regarded as the most robust solution for risk
management and loss prevention in chemical processes. Its proactive interventions of
building safety measures into the process design schemes can avoid adding extensive
end-of-pipe protections when the processes evolve to the operation stage. In practice,
numerous frameworks have been presented to develop inherently safer process routes.
Together with the inherent Safety (S) framework, various dedicated assessment tools for
designing inherent Health (H) and Environmentally (E) benign chemical process routes
have been proposed to eliminate or minimize the SHE risks at the design stage.
However, the dedicated inherent SHE assessment tools give limited attention to the
weights and uncertainties of the component indicators. Also, whether the incremental
costs of implementing "inherent" principles can distort the overall process friendliness
is yet to be demonstrated. To bridge the gaps, this study weighted and reconciled the
separate inherent SHE metrics with cost indices considering the risk uncertainties, thus
developing a novel Reconciled Friendly Process Framework (RFPF) to realize
inherently Friendlier Chemical Processes (FCP). The FCP are characterized to be
inherently safer, healthier, and more environmentally benign with tradeoff
considerations on the incremental costs of design modifications. To develop the RFPF
and realize the FCP, the pioneering Inherent Safety Index (ISI), Inherent Occupational Health Index (IOHI), Inherent Environmental Toxicity Hazard (IETH), and Inherent
Safety Implementation Cost (ISIC) were selected and adapted to indicate the inherent
friendliness features. Subsequently, the selected inherent friendliness indicators were
weighted using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method and reconciled using the
fuzzy logic and Bayesian Networks (BN). Lastly, the newly developed RFPF was
validated by a case study of biodiesel production processes. The results show that the
inherent friendliness of the Baseline Design Processing Option (BDPO) was estimated
as Moderate (M) level (inherent friendliness ≈ 3.05), while it improved to Relatively
Friendly (RF) level (inherent friendliness ≈ 2.28) after implementing inherently
friendlier modifications. The significant improvement of the inherent friendliness
implies that the Modified Design Processing Option (MDPO), compared with the
BDPO, can be a more reliable option with fewer built-in SHE risks under the
incorporated incremental costs. The newly developed RFPF synthesized the conflicting
factors of SHE and cost indices with weights and normalized risk scores to develop
inherently FCP during the process design stage, which can be expected to use as a more
realistic tool to proactively, fundamentally, and economically reduce the SHE risks at
their sources.
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