Analysis of equipment failures as contributors to chemical process accidents (original) (raw)
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Technical Analysis of Accident in Chemical Process Industry and Lessons Learnt
aidic.it
A study of past accidents in the chemical process industry (CPI) has been carried out. It is found that the majority (73%) of the accidents were caused by technical and engineering failures. Based on the causes of accident and types of equipment failures, five common features of accident in the CPI were identified. The analysis reveals that the contribution of the design to accidents is significant and the advancement of knowledge/technology is not shared effectively by practitioners. Dependency on the add-on control strategy should be reduced and inherently safer or passive engineered must be considered as premier risk reduction strategy to lessen the safety load, for better design and to prevent accident effectively.
Statistical Analysis of Contributors to Chemical Process Accidents
Chemical Engineering & Technology, 2013
A database study of accident contributors in the chemical process industry (CPI) was carried out. All 364 CPI-related accidents available in the Failure Knowledge Database were analyzed to identify the main and the subcontributors of the accidents. The accident contributors were ranked in accordance with their frequency and importance in accident prevention. The most common accident contributors were the human and organizational aspects in operation (19 % of contributors), contamination (11 %), flow-related issues (11 %), and heat transfer (10 %). In the main contributor analysis, the same classes of contributors were also the most frequent causes of accidents. A four-quadrant analysis identified the most important contributors to be focused on in accident prevention: contamination, flowrelated and heat transfer categories. The relationships between the contributors were also studied using an interconnection matrix, which revealed three functional groups of accident contributors. Their relationships were illustrated through an interconnection diagram.
Analysis of Main Accident Contributor According to Process Safety Management Elements Failure
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
Process safety management (PSM) covers the aspect of process hazard identification, understanding the level of risk and hazard reduction to prevent process-related failures. The need for understanding on how the process safety elements fail is essential in improving the quality of the accidents prevention effort. In this paper, the contributions of PSM element to chemical process accident are studied using major process failures in the chemical process industry (CPI). Around 770 major accident cases were collected and analysed from several accident data base such as Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB-US), European Major Accident Reporting System (EMARS), Failure Knowledge Database (FKD-Japan) and Accident Reporting Information Analysis (ARIA). The PSM element failures were ranked in accordance to their frequency and importance in accident prevention. Based on the result, majority of the element failure is classified as design and technical reasons (53 % of total pro...
Types of accidents occurring in chemical process industries and approaches to their modeling
International Journal of Engineering, Science and Mathematics, 2017
Accidents in chemical process industry cause significant lossessin terms of human health, life, property and environmental pollution. An accident starts with loss of containment of one or other hazardous substance resulting in fire, explosion, or dispersion of toxic material. The severity of an accident depends both on the scale of the accident and nature of impacted surroundings. This paper presents an overview of the types of accident that occur in chemical process industry, their damage potential, and how the likely impacts are forecast.
The Contribution of Management of Change to Process Safety Accident in the Chemical Process Industry
Chemical engineering transactions, 2017
Management of Change (MOC) is a process for evaluating and controlling modifications to facility design, operation, organisation, or activities. It is one of the most important elements of Process Safety Management (PSM). In chemical process industries (CPI), MOC is required to ensure that safety, health and environment are controlled. In recent years, the number of accidents related to MOC failure is significant and caused by the lacks of MOC management, organisation safety culture, design failure, incompetency, human factor and etc. From the accident statistics published by Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB-US), European Major Accident Reporting System (EMARS-European), Failure Knowledge Database (FKD-Japan) and Accident Reporting Information Analysis (ARIA-France), MOC contributes significantly to the occurrence of accidents and its percentage contribution to accident rate is not decreasing over the past 20 years. In this paper, the contribution of MOC failure t...
Chemical Engineering & Technology, 2018
This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the final Version of Record (VOR). This work is currently citable by using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) given below. The final VoR will be published online in Early View as soon as possible and may be different to this Accepted Article as a result of editing. Readers should obtain the final VoR from the journal website shown below when it is published to ensure accuracy of information. The authors are responsible for the content of this Accepted Article.
Major hazards in the process industries: Achievements and challenges in loss prevention
Journal of Hazardous Materials, 1992
Working Party (WP) on Loss Prevention (LP) in the Process Industries, of which the authors are all members, was initiated. It is therefore worthwhile to look back and also to look forward to what we can expect to come. For this paper we were asked to focus on the evolution of process safety, particularly as it occurred in the U.K. and The Netherlands.
Process safety enhancement in chemical plant design by exploiting accident knowledge
The accident rate in the chemical industry has not been decreasing although they could be prevented by using the existing knowledge. The aim of this thesis is to enhance the utilization of knowledge from earlier accidents especially in the designing of chemical plants. The experience feedback on accidents is improved by analyzing and disseminating knowledge on accident contributors to design activities. The research was done by analyzing the 364 chemical process accident reports available in the Failure Knowledge Database (FKD). It was found that the technical contributors (79%) dominated the accidents in the CPI. Deeper analyses were carried out to identify the accident contributors, and design and operation errors for the six most common equipment types of accidents. The other indicators of accidents included in the study were; the contributors share as main contributor (SMC), equipment specific contributors, and the combination of high SMC and frequency. In design and operation errors analyses, the study found that about 80% of the accident cases were contributed by at least one design error with an average of 2.3 errors per accident. The timing of the errors was analyzed and it shows that about half (47%) of the design and operation errors were made during the process design-oriented stages. Thus, more focus should be given in the making of fundamental decisions such as process conditions, chemicals and reactions during the early phases of the design. The corrective actions proposed in accident reports employed typically the outer layers of protection such as procedural changes (53% of cases) even though the design errors are generally dominant. The inherently safer design proposed was only 18% of cases; and these were based on the most used principles which were 'error tolerance' and 'moderate'. Current design oriented safety methods do not fully utilize knowledge from earlier accidents and therefore do not facilitate learning. For example, HAZOP is often employed only as a final check and do not support the designer during the work. Therefore the thesis proposed a method for identification of accident contributors and design errors throughout the design stages by utilizing knowledge from earlier accidents. The method is based on information obtained from accident contributors and design errors discovered which will be presented in the first part of this thesis. The aim is to show also their mechanisms and time of creation. The proposed method would support the design process by having an early design error detection and elimination through design changes. Therefore, cost and safety benefits can be achieved by undergoing changes in the earlier stages of plant design. The Bhopal tragedy is used as the case study to demonstrate and test the method. The proposed method could be used to predict an average of up to 85% of accident contributors. Keywords experience feedback, accident contributor, plant design, process lifecycle ISBN (printed) 978-952-60-4909-0 ISBN (pdf) 978-952-60-4910-6
Origin of equipment design and operation errors
Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 2012
The paper discusses the origin of chemical process equipment accidents by analyzing past accident cases available in the Failure Knowledge Database (FKD). The design and operation errors of the process equipment that caused the accidents were analyzed together with their time of occurrence. It was found that design errors contributed to 79% of accidents while the rest were only due to human and organizational errors in the operation stage and external factors. The most common types of errors were related to layout, organizational errors in the operation stage, considerations of reactivity and incompatibility, and wrongly selected process conditions (each approx. 13% of total accident contributors). On average there were about 2 design errors per accident. The timing of the errors was quite evenly distributed between various lifecycle stages. Nearly half (47%) of the errors were made in process design-oriented stages, one fourth (26%) in detailed engineering, and one fifth (20%) in operation. In addition, the most frequent design and operation errors for each equipment type were identified. A points-to-look-for list was created for each equipment type, showing also the typical time of occurrence of the error. The knowledge of type and timing of design errors can be utilized in design to focus the hazard analysis in each stage on the most error-prone features of design.