Development of hazard prevention strategies for inherent safety assessment during early stage of process design

Abstract

Abstract A safety program that prevents hazards from occurring is preferable than the typical approaches of eliminating hazards upon being detected. Chemical plants should be designed so that they are user-friendly and exhibit good safety features to prevent accidents. This can be done by preventing the presence of hazards in the process fundamentally, which is formally known as the inherent safety concept. This paper discusses the development of process hazard prevention strategies (HPS) during the early design stage. The strategies were formulated into a detailed framework which was constructed using thematic analysis. The thematic analysis was used to extract hazard prevention strategies from the accident databases – producing results in the form of keywords, referred here as themes and generated codes. Common keywords that appeared in the accident databases on how to prevent the accidents were gathered and referred to as generated codes in this research. The generated codes were then grouped into five themes namely; materials, design, operating, chemicals and control. This study was applied to the case study of benzene production from toluene involving separation and heat transfer equipment. The HPS themes identified for separation equipment were design, operating and chemicals, while for heat transfer equipment the themes identified were materials, design, operating, chemicals and control. This technique produced similar results as two other techniques on the Bhopal case study and the toluene nitration case study, with justified differences. This not only proves the effectiveness of the framework but also supports the validity of the framework.