Despite of the above efforts, there remains the need to develop a design evaluation that is able to identify and assess inherent hazards associated with ISD options at early stage of design since this is the ideal time to minimise hazards with less cost and time.
Besides, this study is aimed at developing a method which combines these two different activities i.e. generating inherently safer design alternatives and undertaking risk analysis as a part of the risk management procedure at early lifecycle of process plant. Apart from that, the present research also attempts to integrate qualitative and quantitative techniques to allow comprehensive safety analysis to be performed in a single framework. In the next section, several aspects considered in developing the new methodology are explained which takes into accounts some points and findings from literatures to further enhance the Inherent Safety analysis.
2.7.1 Aspects to consider in developing a Qualitative Methodology
Several researchers highlighted the importance of incorporating ISD concept at hazard review stage as one way to produce the inherent strategies. Moore (1999) pointed out the lack of standardised approaches to commonly applied process hazard studies and a failure to include Inherent Safety during process hazard review. He also suggested a
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hierarchy of Inherent Safety that could be suitable to be used during process hazard review. Kletz (1999) also stated that there is a lack of investigative tool, similar to HAZOP, for examining designs and uncovering ways of introducing intensified and other ISD options. He also discussed a possibility of modifying HAZOP method to be applied at early stage of process design for the purpose of generating potential ISD options. Bollinger et al. (1996) described in detail the Inherent Safety review method including the preparation to review, methods and tools and also the Inherent Safety strategies for the lifecycle of process. Preston and Hawskley (1997) suggested the application of checklists and guidewords for systematic consideration of health, safety and environment aspects during process design. Mansfield and Cassidy (1994) also suggested the use of structured brainstorming, guideword based HAZOP style examination of process at the early design stages, checklists and Inherent Safety index for performing safety, health and environment analysis. One example on the modification of HAZOP concept is illustrated by Mosley et al. (2000) to identify reactive chemical hazards during process development stage because HAZOP and its thought process are proven to be generalised enough to be applied at any design stage.
Thus, based on the above literatures, it is shown that inherent strategies can be generated qualitatively by maximising the ISD concept during hazard review stage. In this way, one not only be able to understand the hazards involved in the process but also enable the identification of possible inherent solutions to eliminate or reduce the hazards.
By taking into account of the several limitations to incorporate ISD concept at early stage of design such as constraints in getting technical details, process information and time restriction, the present research attempts to develop an ISD methodology based on qualitative approach as this approach is far more easily accepted and it is proven through the success of HAZOP method. Thus, the qualitative method is developed in step-wise procedure which integrates the hazard analysis with the heuristics of ISD concept with the objective specifically to identify inherent hazards in the process as early as possible. In addition, the qualitative tool also should be able to generate ISD alternatives to resolve the hazards including capable in choosing the best ISD alternatives using several guidelines and guidewords to provide a simple and systematic technique in the methodology.
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2.7.2 Approach and conflicts analysis in a Quantitative Methodology
The constraints on the available quantitative Inherent Safety tools in the literature merely focused on “single” or one-way evaluation of Inherent Safety characteristics and hazard magnitude within the process unit only and less focus on the “interaction”
of potential hazards being transferred to the surrounding of the process unit when changes are made in the design. The “single framework” also denotes that the evaluation made is to compare between design options that could only minimise one hazard, which indirectly influenced the selection of dominance parameters in the overall score of the design option. While the “interaction framework” proposed a comparison between design options through evaluating the possibility of occurrence of other hazards from design modification to the surrounding of the studied process unit. It can be further explained through example given by Hendershot (2006) that a plant might reduce the size of a hazardous material storage tank, thereby reducing inventory and site risk. Use of smaller tanks, however, may require a change in how material is shipped to the plant from railroad tank cars (typically about 300,000 pound shipments for many materials) to trucks (typically about 30,000 pound shipments) because the smaller tank cannot contain more than a truck load of material. Now, the plant will receive 10 times as many shipments, and they will come by road rather than by rail. Depending on the particular location, road shipments may be inherently more hazardous. Even though the site risk is reduced, the overall risk to society may actually be increased.
As mentioned above, most of the previous works used a hazard-based approach to evaluate the Inherent Safety characteristics of different process options. This approach can generally indicate which option is relatively inherently safer, however, it may ignore the possibility of hazard transferred to other processes and its surroundings and new hazard could be difficult to control. Often when design is modified, there are possibilities of other hazards being introduced and increased the magnitude of the present hazards, which earlier are less critical. Therefore, a hazard-based method may not be the ultimate decision making tool to select the best ISD options as the likelihood of hazard being transferred due to design modification not fully captured in this approach. To overcome this limitation, a risk-based approach is proposed in this thesis to evaluate inherently safer process design alternatives. This approach is more
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sensible to facilitate the designers for realistic and effective decision-making in diverse likelihood of design scenarios. The proposed risk-based method is not fully following the conventional QRA approach but to expand the probability concept by evaluating the likelihood of hazard being transferred within the process rather than to put focused only on the failure of the associated equipment which perceptibly impractical to be done at preliminary design stage.
CHAPTER 3
INTEGRATED INHERENTLY SAFER DESIGN EVALUATION TOOL (IISDET) FRAMEWORK