Using risk meshing to improve three-dimensional risk assessment of chemical industry

Abstract

With the development of three-dimensional (3D) risk assessment, the accuracy of 3D risk calculations plays an important role in ensuring the quality of risk assessment results for the chemical industry. A more accurate risk calculation is significant to improving the accuracy and reasonability of 3D risk assessment results. Therefore, a novel risk calculation method called risk meshing (RM) for field theory-based 3D risk assessment is proposed in this study. For the proposed RM, the 3D risk is evaluated and calculated based on the possibility, vulnerability, and consequence with respect to the risk. An assessed elementary unit (AEU) is then introduced to compute the 3D risk in different partitioned blocks by taking advantage of the regional evaluation ability with respect to the vulnerability assessment. Fire and explosion accidents caused by storage tanks in a coal chemical industry plant are employed to make a case study, and the evaluation results show that RM can provide more accurate results because building and road layouts are considered for the risk calculation. Meanwhile, the optimal risk reduction route (ORRR) is confirmed by RM and using traditional methods. Hence, the validity of RM is verified based on the comparison of ORRRs obtained by RM and those by traditional methods. The paper indicates the significance of RM in improving the accuracy and reasonability of 3D risk assessments by analyzing the evaluation and comparison results, which lays a theoretical foundation for further development of field theory-based 3D risk assessments of chemical industry.