Safety Assessment Curve (SAC) for inherent safety assessment in petrochemical industry

Abstract

This paper highlights the development of a new numerical approach for safety assessment called Safety Assessment Curve (SAC). Most of the current methods for assessing inherent safety are index based method. Among the disadvantages of such methods is it employs scaling by dividing physical or chemical properties into subjective ranges and sudden jump in the score value at the sub-range boundary. This new technique can offer more useful features because aside from assessing the routes numerically, it could also graphically visualizes the effect of temperature, pressure, heat of reaction, process inventory, flammability, explosiveness, toxicity and reactivity in designing an inherently safer design for both, grassroot and retrofit cases in petrochemical industry without including subjective scaling and sudden jump in the score value. Due to page limitations, this paper will only discuss the development of SAC for chemical safety parameters. This novel technique can be used as an effective method to find the safer route among several number of alternatives for chemical synthesis or process retrofitting, besides highlighting the potential source of hazards in the process through numerical and graphical approach. The new SAC technique illustrated in this paper has been tested on methyl methacrylate manufacturing confirming its superiority in comparison to index-based method. Tertiery butyl alcohol (TBA) route has the lowest Chemical Safety Total Score suggesting it as the safest routes among the three routes for MMA production compared to acetone cyanohydrin (ACH) and ethylene via methyl propionate (C2/MP) based routes.