A Method to Estimate Process Plant Seismic Resilience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio C. Caputo ◽  
Fabrizio Paolacci
Keyword(s):  
Economic Loss ◽  
Process Industry ◽  
System Capacity ◽  
Industrial Facilities ◽  
Civil Infrastructures ◽  
Capacity Loss ◽  
Emergency Managers ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Seismic Resilience

Resilience is a concept encompassing both the system ability to survive perturbating events which may lead to a disruption of its operations, and the rapidity in restoring system capacity after the disruptive event has occurred. While the concept of resilience has been dealt with from a number of different perspectives and in different contexts, from supply chains to networked utilities to civil infrastructures and building, research about resilience estimation of industrial facilities is lacking. In this paper a quantitative method to assess plant resilience is developed with reference to process plants and disruptive events represented by natural events such as earthquakes. The proposed method is easy to apply and amenable to both deterministic and probabilistic analysis. It provides a direct estimation of capacity loss after the disruptive event, and the time trend of recovery as well as the related economic loss. Therefore, it may provide a decision making support to facility planners and emergency managers in the process industry.

scholarly journals Discharge and atmospheric dispersion modelling in case of hazardous material releases

2022 ◽  
Vol 354 ◽  
pp. 00009
Author(s):  
Vlad Mihai Pasculescu ◽  
Emilian Ghicioi ◽  
Ligia Ioana Tuhut ◽  
Adrian Bogdan Simon-Marinica ◽  
Dragos Pasculescu
Keyword(s):  
Process Analysis ◽  
Atmospheric Dispersion ◽  
Hazardous Material ◽  
Process Industries ◽  
Industrial Facilities ◽  
Toxic Releases ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Fire And Explosion ◽  
Accident Scenarios

One of the most important tools for improving the OHS level in process industries is represented by risk analysis and assessment. Within industrial units in operation or in the ones which find themselves in the design phase, risk assessment is carried out for determining the hazards which may occur and which may lead to unwanted events, such as hazardous toxic releases, fires and explosions. Accidental releases of toxic/flammable/explosive substances may have serious consequences on workers or on the neighbouring population, therefore the need to establish safety areas based on best practices in the field and on scientific grounds is fully justified. Pressure tanks containing hazardous materials represent one of the most relevant industrial facilities within process plants, being most of the time exposed to hazardous toxic releases, fire and explosion risks. The current study aims to evaluate the consequences and discuss the safety distances required in case of an accidental release of a hazardous material from a tank located within a process plant, using process analysis software tools. Accident scenarios are modelled for comparison purposes with consequence modelling software widely used in safety engineering.

The Use of Photogrammetry in Piping Design

1983 ◽  
Vol 197 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
P A Bracewell ◽  
U R Klement
Keyword(s):  
Information Retrieval ◽  
Mathematical Formulation ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Process Industry ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Positional Data

Piping design for ‘revamp’ projects in the process industry requires the retrieval of large amounts of ‘as-built’ data from existing process plant installations. Positional data with a high degree of accuracy are required. Photogrammetry, the science of measurement from photographs, was identified in Imperial Chemical Industries plc (ICI) as a suitable tool for information retrieval. The mathematical formulation enabling the definition of three-dimensional positions from photographic information is described. The process of using ICI's photogrammetric system for the definition of complete objects such as structures and pipes is illustrated. The need for specialized photogrammetric software for design purposes is explained. A case study describing how the photogrammetric system has been applied is described and graphical outputs from this exercise are shown. It is concluded that this particular photogrammetric system has proved to be a cost effective and accurate tool for the retrieval of ‘as-built’ information.

scholarly journals Risk Assessment and Deployment for Safety Showers and Eyewash Stations in the Process Plant Industry

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (16) ◽  
pp. 8707
Author(s):  
Jae-Young Choi ◽  
Sang-Hoon Byeon
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Industrial Hygiene ◽  
Process Equipment ◽  
Process Safety ◽  
Plant Industry ◽  
Hazardous Chemicals ◽  
Safety Improvement ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Operator Safety

Safety showers and eyewash stations are equipment used for primary washing if their operator is exposed to hazardous chemicals. Therefore, safety showers and eyewash stations should be installed to ensure operator safety in process plants with excessive hazardous chemicals. International guidelines related to safety showers and eyewash stations are introduced in ANSI Z358.1, BS EN 15154, and German DIN 12899-3:2009, but only mechanical specifications regarding safety showers and eyewash stations are suggested. As such, there are currently no engineering guidelines, books, or technical journal papers requiring safety showers or eyewash stations and their efficient deployment. Thus, this study conducted risk assessment from an industrial hygiene perspective, suggesting which process equipment requires a safety shower and eyewash, including their economical and efficient deployment for operator safety. In industry, safety showers and eyewash stations are considered part of the process safety field; this study attempted to contribute to the safety improvement of operators by applying risk assessment of the industrial hygiene field. More studies are needed that contribute to operators’ safety by incorporating industrial hygiene fields for other process safety fields, including safety showers and eyewash stations.

scholarly journals Towards Semi-Automatic Generation of a Steady State Digital Twin of a Brownfield Process Plant

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (19) ◽  
pp. 6959
Author(s):  
Seppo Sierla ◽  
Lotta Sorsamäki ◽  
Mohammad Azangoo ◽  
Antti Villberg ◽  
Eemeli Hytönen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Simulation Model ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Automatic Generation ◽  
Digital Twin ◽  
Design Alternatives ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Engineering Effort ◽  
Process Measurements

Researchers have proposed various models for assessing design alternatives for process plant retrofits. Due to the considerable engineering effort involved, no such models exist for the great majority of brownfield process plants, which have been in operation for years or decades. This article proposes a semi-automatic methodology for generating a digital twin of a brownfield plant. The methodology consists of: (1) extracting information from piping and instrumentation diagrams, (2) converting the information to a graph format, (3) applying graph algorithms to preprocess the graph, (4) generating a simulation model from the graph, (5) performing manual expert editing of the generated model, (6) configuring the calculations done by simulation model elements and (7) parameterizing the simulation model according to recent process measurements in order to obtain a digital twin. Since previous work exists for steps (1–2), this article focuses on defining the methodology for (3–5) and demonstrating it on a laboratory process. A discussion is provided for (6–7). The result of the case study was that only few manual edits needed to be made to the automatically generated simulation model. The paper is concluded with an assessment of open issues and topics of further research for this 7-step methodology.

scholarly journals Application of Exergy-Based Fault Detection in a Gas-To-Liquids Process Plant

Entropy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarita Greyling ◽  
Henri Marais ◽  
George van Schoor ◽  
Kenneth Richard Uren
Keyword(s):  
Fault Detection ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Fault Detection And Isolation ◽  
Tennessee Eastman Process ◽  
Aspen Hysys ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Commercial Process ◽  
Gas To Liquids ◽  
First Time

Fault detection and isolation (FDI) within the petrochemical industries (PCIs) is largely dominated by statistical techniques. Although a signal-based technique centered on exergy flows within a process plant was proposed, it has only been applied to single process units. The exergy-based scheme has not yet been applied to process plants that feature at least a single recycle stream. The Tennessee Eastman process (TEP) is commonly used as an FDI benchmark process, but due to obfuscation, the TEP cannot be directly implemented in a commercial process simulator. Thus, application of FDI techniques to proprietary processes will require significant investment into the implementation of the FDI scheme. This is a key impediment to the wide-spread comparison of various FDI techniques to non-benchmark processes. In this paper, a gas-to-liquids (GTL) process model is developed in Aspen HYSYS®, and the model’s performance is validated. The exergy-based FDI technique is applied to the GTL process while the process is subjected to carefully selected faults. The selected faults aim to affect several process units, and specifically, the resultant recycle stream of the GTL process is considered. The results indicate that even though the exergy-based technique makes use of fixed thresholds, complete detection and isolation can be achieved for a list of common process faults. This is significant since it shows, for the first time, that the exergy-based FDI scheme can successfully be deployed in processes with recycle streams.

scholarly journals Resilience of Process Plant: What, Why, and How Resilience Can Improve Safety and Sustainability

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (15) ◽  
pp. 6152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Pasman ◽  
Kedar Kottawar ◽  
Prerna Jain
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Business Environment ◽  
Warning Signals ◽  
Plant Safety ◽  
Chemical Manufacturing ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Proactive Measures

Resilience is the ability to restore performance after sustaining serious damage by a usually unexpected threat. This paper analyzes resilience of process plants as there are oil and gas refining, chemical manufacturing, power-producing plants, and many more. Over the years, plant safety has shifted from retrospective to proactive measures. Safety is important from many points of view, such as protection of workforce and nearby population, but certainly too from an economical and sustainability aspect. Pro-action requires predictive insight of what in the process can go wrong because of internal or external disruptive disturbance. Over the years, to that end, much effort was spent developing risk assessment methods and management. However, risk assessment has proven to be fallible because of various uncertainties and not the least by overlooked or unknown threats. To protect against those upsetting threats, measures can be taken up to a certain limit. These start in designing error-tolerant equipment able to be receptive to early warning signals during operations, responding to those with ‘plasticity’ of mind (that is, an organization and its leadership especially able to think ‘outside-the box’ for coping with unexpected situations), and finally, to deploy effective emergency response and able to recover from damage quickly. The paper presents a summary/review of nearly a decade of research work at the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center at the Texas A&M University to develop the concept and the techniques to realize a resilient plant, so far with a focus on chemical plant. It is, however, still a ‘work-in-progress’; potential is large. Besides the conceptual details, cases are presented that show how human and technical factors, combined in a socio-technical system, can lead to a broader plant safety insight enabling more effective risk control and increased resilience. These cases have up to now only considered warning signals and possible management action, while still limited to internal threats. Hence, aspects of equipment design and recovery should be further considered, also in the light of the dynamics of present-day business environment.

scholarly journals Factory Manufactured Modular Construction of Process Plants

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Wrigley ◽  
Paul Wood ◽  
Sam O’Neill ◽  
Richard Hall ◽  
Daniel Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Chemical Process ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Plant Design ◽  
Modular Construction ◽  
Assembly Design ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants

Off-Site Modular Construction (OSMC) research has been a growing research area over the past two decades because of low productivity in construction. Tools are superior in factories and productivity is much higher compared to a stick built site. This has spawned the development small, factory built, rapidly deployable and flexible process plants to take advantage of the gains in OSMC productivity. Chemical process plant research is studying fast, automated design and configuration. In this paper, a literature review was performed on modular factory manufactured process plants. The literature review found that moving to small scale OSMC plant systems could enable cost and schedule savings and months of design time compared to the previous on-site assembly design. It was also found that while automation has been applied in earlier stages of the plant design process, a layout optimisation methodology has not been applied to small OSMC process plants. The paper then proposes to utilise a mathematical layout optimisation model to help design and construct modular process plants and considers how this may fit into the process plant design process, as well as considering the transport requirements for modules.

scholarly journals Capacity Analysis of IRS-Based UAV Communications with Imperfect Phase Compensation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
MOHAMMAD AHMAD Al-Jarrah ◽  
Emad Alsusa ◽  
Arafat Al-Dweik ◽  
Daniel K. C. So
Keyword(s):  
Signal To Noise Ratio ◽  
Phase Error ◽  
Random Variable ◽  
System Capacity ◽  
High Signal ◽  
Capacity Analysis ◽  
Capacity Loss ◽  
Von Mises ◽  
Reflecting Surfaces ◽  
Incident Waves

<div>This paper presents the capacity analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications supported by flying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). In the considered system, some of the UAVs are equipped with an IRS panel that applies certain phase-shifts to the incident waves before being reflected to the receiving UAV. In contrast to existing work, this letter considers the effect of imperfect phase knowledge on the system capacity, where the phase error is modeled as a von Mises random variable with parameter k. Analytical results, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, show that the achievable capacity is dependent on the phase error, however, the capacity loss becomes negligible at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and when k>6.</div>

scholarly journals Process Plant Upgradation Using Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) Criteria

2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dongqiao Bai ◽  
Qi Yang ◽  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Shouzhi Li
Keyword(s):  
Modular Design ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Market Survey ◽  
Effective Solution ◽  
Process Plant ◽  
Process Plants ◽  
Reliability And Availability ◽  
Expected Outcomes ◽  
Selection Of

The objective of this study is to propose a solution for process plant upgradation becoming extinct due to obsoleteness of spares. The study will help in reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) based upgradation of control system of process plants in developing countries. Available options for plant upgradation are compact control, modular, and semiautomatic. RAM based upgradation provides solution which is high in reliability and availability (usually all parts are replaced with upgraded and compatible technology) and is easy to maintain throughout the service life of process plant. Case study for stacker and reclaimer of cement plant upgradation is considered to both implement and evaluate the idea. Upgradation methodology is finalized by expert’s feedback regarding selection of hardware with respect to availability, market survey to validate the opinion, and economical availability viability of selected hardware. Pre- and postupgradation scenarios are analyzed to validate the implementation of study and conclude the expected outcomes. The process plant upgradation yielded a cost-effective solution to the problem with automation increasing by 17%, plant maintainability increasing by 80%, and downtime of plant decreasing by 17%. Among all available options, modular design Op1 is considered the best choice that can satisfy RAM criteria.

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