Whether, whither, wither new technologies for safer process design?
Rajagopalan Srinivasan
Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
National University of Singapore
10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260
Email: [email protected]
Abstract
Process safety has been of widespread interest to the chemical engineering community for over three decades. Arising from this, terms such as hazard & operability (HAZOP) analysis, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and inherent safety have entered the lexicon even of students pursuing a first degree in Chemical Engineering. Concomitantly, regulations and societal pressures have been motivating sustainable, environmentally benign chemical plants. Arising from these, in the last decade, researchers have perceived that there exists a need for advanced technologies that enable safer process design. This has resulted in several major developments – automated synthesis of fault trees, automated HAZOP analysis, automated inherent safety analysis – to name a few. In contrast to accident databases, QRA programs, etc, which aid the analysis by organizing data for easy retrieval or automating the calculations, these automata go a step beyond to perform the analysis and churn out the final study report. In this paper, I will review the case for (and against) safety automation tools. I will also summarize the technologies they contain and their status vis-à-vis industrial adoption. Finally, I will identify some possible target areas for future automata.
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