Sharif Digital Repository

There are different well-established strategies for making a process plant inherently safer. The benefits of applying these strategies on reducing the overall risk inside a plant are obvious. However, some of these changes are rejected many times because they appear to be too costly. But if the effects of applying inherently safer design strategies are investigated not only on the processing costs of a plant but also on the potential accident costs, the decision would in fact be different. In this paper an optimization procedure is proposed which integrates both processing and accident costs for different design schemes. In this procedure, some of the design variables are chosen with regard... 

Today, Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) has become an efficient tool in decision making for safety and process experts. To assess the risk of any accident scenario, it is necessary that the probability of that event be determined in addition to estimating the probable consequences. Event tree and fault tree analysis are known to be the standard tools for calculating the frequency of incident outcomes.
In this research, a new method based on Markov chin and Fuzzy theory is presented to estimate the occurrence probability of events. A one of important parameter which has sufficient effect on probability of incident frequency, is inspection and maintenance interval. in this research... 

Inherently safer design is the new approach to maximize the overall safety of a process plant. This approach suggests some risk reduction strategies to be implemented in the early stages of design. There are different well-established strategies for making a process plant inherently safer. The benefits of applying these strategies on reducing the overall risk inside a plant are obvious. However, some of these changes are rejected many times because they appear to be too costly. But if the effects of applying inherently safer design strategies are investigated not only on the processing costs of a plant but also on the potential accident costs, the decision would in fact be different. In this... 

Among probable hazards in chemical industries: vapor cloud explosion (VCE) is one of the worst and most destructive ones. More than half of the major process inci¬dents, according to the statistics, are VCEs. VCE causes the most serious consequences; therefore, it attracts many attentions to itself. Accordingly, plenty of researches have been done for the purpose of protection against VCE effects. All efforts in this field can be categorized in two different main activities; firstly, prescribing safety distances between groups of hazardous equipment and vulnerable areas, secondly, using facilities which reinforce vulnerable areas against explosion blasts. Regardless to which category is... 

The release of toxic materials causes tragic accidents every year. There are various techniques in order to mitigate the release effect of these materials such as Application of air jets, steam curtains and water curtains. In this study first, previous works are reviewed in order to select the best technique for the mitigation of heavy toxic gas release. Then CFD modeling is used to simulate this technique.
A field situation in which chlorine gas was released upwind of water spray was simulated using the open-source software FDS (Fire Dynamic Simulator), a CFD model. Only mechanical effects of water sprays are considered; hence the effect of absorbtion is neglected. Finally tha... 

The release of toxic materials causes tragic accidents every year. There are various techniques in order to mitigate the release effect of these materials such as Application of air jets, steam curtains and water curtains. This study presents numerical calculations to reproduce the continuous ammonia release dispersion with and without the mitigating influence of a downwind water curtain using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software ANSYS Fluent 15.0. The RNG model coupled with Lagrangian discrete phase model (DPM) was used to simulate the dilution effectiveness of the water curtain system. The ammonia absorption was taken into account by means of user-defined functions (UDF). The... 

Fire is the most likely type of process accident which occurs in industrial plants. Among all different types of fire, pool fire is the most frequent one, so there are extensive researches done about pool fire. One of the research areas that has drawn a lot of attention in recent years, is pool fire modeling. Results obtained from fire modeling are quite applicable in different fields of safety engineering such as Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) or fire proofing studies of process equipment. But fire modeling is an inherently complex process. Because there are several aspects involved such as multi-phase flow, turbulent mixing, combustion and different mechanisms of heat transfer. This... 

Asphaltenedeposition is a major problem during natural depletion and EOR processes due to formation damage issues. It is necessary to reveal asphaltene deposition mechanisms and its effective parameters to prepare an acceptable prevention strategy. Therefore, different natural depletion and EOR experiments must performed on core samples. In this research, Effect of CO2 injection on asphaltene deposition phenomena has been surveyed. Two carbonate core samples and one sandstone core sample was used in experiments. The oil used in these experiments was recombinedoilfrom one of Iranian offshore oilfield.In order to estimate permeability reduction during experiment, injection of oil and CO2 was... 

Domino accidents are one types of incidents that lead to irreparable damage to industrial units. Since the consequences of such incidents are far more than the first level incident, consideration of this issue and the provision of appropriate strategies for identifying and evaluating this type of incident is very important. Major efforts have been made in the area of process safety is in risk assessment and identify possible scenarios and their probability of occurrence, and have not addressed the financial consequences of an incident. In this research, an algorithm has been developed to estimate the financial losses incurred with an industrial unit due to a domino incident and various... 

Gas detection systems are now recognized as an essential component of safety in process units.but their successful performance depends strongly on the number and location of the detectors.As for the limited resources available (detectors), the placement of gas detectors can be considered as an optimization problem with different objective functions. In this research, an attempt was made to provide models and methods that quantitatively and from a practical point of view to optimum locate the detectors. Initially, a risk-based method was presented that defines the necessary steps for the arrangement of fire gas detectors with the aim of covering the maximum risk of leakage scenarios (risk:... 

Inherent safety means that the process is naturally safe and the conditions of occurrence of unsafe cases and situations are eliminated from the system so that unsafe conditions can be controlled and prevented from occurrence by means of layers of protection. In general, evaluation of inherent safety may be studied in two different conditions; the first one is associated with the units that are not completely designed and built yet. In the initial steps of developing a process, there is much freedom in the determination of materials, equipment, and designing variables. As soon as the process enters its life cycle, making changes in the process will be very difficult and expensive. Therefore,... 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution brought about a fundamental change in the system of management and production, especially in the field of industry, which was accompanied by the development of technology in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and biotechnology. In line with these changes, the industry needs a new method to evaluate the reliability of operational equipment using artificial intelligence and intelligent systems, which aims to optimize the balance between a variety of repair methods with the possibility of timely replacement of parts. In this new method, the life of the parts is increased and the unplanned maintenance costs and labor are reduced. One... 

Considering the supply and demand market of natural gas, methanol, propylene and ethylene and the propylene value chain, it is expected that the design of the propylene production process from methanol produced from natural gas and its implementation in Iran country can significantly flourish the production of polypropylene, acrylonitrile and Etc. On the other hand, with the industrialization of this process, the uncontrolled export of methanol from Iran to countries such as China and the devaluation of methanol will be prevented. In this report, the process of producing synthetic gas from natural gas using autothermal reactor and heat exchange reforming, separation and storage of carbon... 

Due to the replacement of fossil fuel with cleaner products, the reduction of fuel consumption in transportation until 2045, the excessive production of fuel oil in refineries and the growth of feed demand from downstream chemical units, have made countries to upgrade their refineries or construct Petro-refineries. The Petro-refinery is a new generation of refinery and its main purpose is to supply chemicals to downstream units. The products of these units will have more valuable than fuel refineries. Steam cracking unit, aromatic unit and propane dehydrogenation unit are important units that are in Petro-refineries. In this research, all refinery units were technically and economically... 

Asphaltene are the heaviest components if some crude oil which are in thermodynamic equilibrium. Any change in the equilibrium condition including change in temperature, pressure or composition may render asphaltene to come out of solution and precipitate. Asphaltene precipitation and deposition is one of the main problems in some of the oil fields. Precipitated asphaltene may deposit in the reservoir, near wellbore, wellstring, transport pipeline and surface facilities. In porous media, the deposited asphaltene over the surface and/or across pore throat can severely reduce the effective permeability and results in decreasing of the oil production. Also, the deposited asphaltene results in...