Resilience assessment framework for fast response process systems

Abstract

Resilience is essential to ensure safe and sustainable process operations. It plays a critical role in enabling operations in the remote and extreme environments encountered during operations held offshore or in the Arctic. Resilience is a property of the process or system, and considers three distinct characteristics: absorption, adaptation, and recovery. This work proposes a resilience assessment framework of process systems with fast responses, such as reaction systems. The three characteristics are modelled using system design variables with covariate consideration. Subsequently, these three characteristics are integrated to assess resilience. To enhance the resilience, design changes and operational interventions are explored. The proposed framework is explained using the assessment of an autocatalytic reactor as a case study. A thermal runaway reaction is modelled for resilience, and operational intervention strategy such as adding inhibition is tested to enhance the resilience of the reactor. It was concluded that as the inhibitor injection time was decreased from 5.8 min to 1 min, the value of the proposed resilience metric increased from 0.7 to 0.9. This case study confirms the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed framework.