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Quantitative-Based Safety Evalution in the Primarly Stages of the Project Life Cycle

Khodayari, Ali | 2010

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 40479 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Rashtchian, Davoud; Bozorgmehri, Ramin
  7. Abstract:
  8. 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, most researchers have regarded conceptual phase as the proper time for studying the inherent safety conditions. The second one is associated with the existing units and attempts to identify the points owning unsafe potential and finally to improve and revamp them using a presented index. The method rendered in this project for measuring inherent safety can be applied to selecting the best path of the process intended to produce a specific material. In this method we first try to detect the principal parameters influential in the inherent safety of processes and then try to present the effects of these parameters in the form of numerical indices, by which different paths may be compared based on the level of existing safety and the best path is specified as the initial choice in the end. Meanwhile, considering the uncertainty and abstraction of the subject of safety, fuzzy logic has been employed to model certain variables and to combine quantitative values with qualitative information. Inherent safety can also be utilized as an objective function in process synthesis; in this project, we have attempted to study this topic in the form of a case study. Taking into consideration the parameters presented in this index, this method can provide major advantages with regard to economic, pollution control, staff health, etc. issues as well. The other advantage of this method is offering a guideline to designers and decision-makers in order to identify unsafe cases in a process. However, inherent safety is still not used widely, a major reason of which might be lack of an appropriate tool for studying the measure of inherent safety. In this project, a tool is also introduced for evaluation of inherent safety, which is applied in the preliminary steps of process design, in the conceptual design phase. Less time and effort necessary to evaluate inherent safety can be mentioned as preferences of this tool. The design of this program in the form of automation also results in the omission of human error.

  9. Keywords:
  10. Process Synthesis ; Evolutionary Algorithm ; Fuzzy Logic ; Multiobjective Optimization ; Inherent Safety

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