Failure and Prevention of Pressure Vessels due to Instability of Process System

Abstract

From the analysis of engineering risks of petrochemical plants in recent years, it is found that the change and instability of the process systems have significant effect on the failure of pressure vessels, and the failure of pressure vessels takes place repeatedly due to the inadequate prediction of dynamic risk of the system in the design of pressure vessels. Starting from the analysis of systematic engineering risk methodology, several typical failure cases in petrochemical process systems due to the inadequacy of process design and interlock control are introduced and analyzed in this paper, and the corresponding measures for preventing the failure of pressure vessels caused by system instability at the design and the in-service stage are proposed. It is believed that the basic measures for preventing occurrence of such failure accidents are the analyzing the dynamic risk of the system during the determination of design parameters of pressure vessels at early design stage, verifying process changes and adjusting the configuration of interlock control system according to the design and operating parameters of pressure vessels at the in-service stage.