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Application of Quantitative Risk Assessment to Site and Layout Process Plants

Badri, Naser | 2012

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  1. Type of Document: Ph.D. Dissertation
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 43037 (06)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Chemical and Petroleum Engineering
  6. Advisor(s): Rashtchian, Davod; Nourai, Farshad; Narimannejad, Alireza
  7. Abstract:
  8. Plant layout and siting are the earliest steps in any process design that may have significant effects on the further required level of safety and costs. Extensive carried out studies have been published in literatures in which, the safety factor has been taken into account in the form of prediction the severity of likely accidents. Majority of these studies are based on the accident consequence and other important parameters such as the accident frequency and the density of vulnerable items have been ignored. This recent negligence may lead to over conservative designs. To eliminate this recent deficiency, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) is the best procedure than can be suggested. Therefore, the main purpose of this thesis is an improvement of QRA structure to be customized for safety integrated layout and siting purposes.
    For the layout section, it has been focused on the determination of safe layout for important building considering QRA capabilities. Regarding to the more destructive effects of vapor cloud explosion (VCE) over buildings compared to fire and gas dispersion, VCE is the most credible accident for this study. Thus, the imposed risk by VCEs over buildings should be calculated. In this part of Thesis, the QRA structure has been modified mostly in scenario selection and VCE frequency estimation. These amendments have led to more precise results compared to conventional ones and finally more safe layout of buildings.
    In the siting section, comprehensive studies have been conducted to form societal risk criteria for Iranian oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Following an innovative idea, the criteria are defined to be a reflection of fatal process accident rate in mentioned industries. The main idea is to keep the current rate of accident lower than that recorded for the previous times. For this purpose, an exhaustive databank of process accidents including fatalities has been gathered and the results were quantified in the form of an F-N curve illustrating the social risk criteria. The recent criteria can be widely used for more precise decision making based on the QRA results for siting studies
  9. Keywords:
  10. Risk Assessment ; Localization ; Layout Risk ; Quantitative Risk Analysis ; Risk Criteria ; Process Plants

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