Chemical process industry development

The Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS), a directorate of AIChE, was established in 1985 to develop and disseminate technical information for use in the prevention of major chemical accidents. The CCPS is supported by a diverse group of industrial sponsors in the chemical process industry and related industries who provide the necessary funding and professional guidance for its projects. The CCPS Technical Steering Committee and the technical subcommittees oversee individual projects selected by CCPS. Professional representatives of the sponsoring companies staff the subcommittees, with a member of the CCPS staff coordinating the activities of the sub-committee. 

The first two categories, clarifying and crossflow filters, have been very well developed and optimized for use in biotechnology and standard wastewater treatment applications. Equipment is easily available for these applications, whether as small 0.2 micron sterilizing filter used to terminally sterilize 100 ml of product solution, or a small 500 ml crossflow filter used to concentrate a small amount of antibody solution. Many vendors of this equipment to wastewater treatment applications have their origins in the CPI (Chemical Process Industries), and have incorporated many of the scale-up and optimization properties developed in much larger units used in large scale chemical production. As a result, these two filtration unit operations are one of the most optimized and efficient used in wastewater treatment. 

It was not nndl the 1950s that detonation flame arresters made of crimped metal ribbon elements were developed and began to be used more freqnendy (Binks 1999). The major impetus for die use of crimped metal ribbon detonation flame arresters in the US was the enactment of clean air legislation (Clean Air Act of 1990) which inadvertently created a safety problem by requiring reductions in volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions. To do this, manifolded vent systems (vapor collection systems) were increasingly installed in many chemical process industry plants which captured VOC vapors and transported them to suitable recovery, recycle, or destruction systems. This emission control requirement has led to the introdnction of ignition risks, for example, from a flare or via spontaneous combustion of an activated carbon adsorber bed. Multiple... 

An additional reason for investing resources in error reduction measures is to improve the ability of the industry to conform to regulatory standards. It is likely that as the relationship between hximan error and safety becomes more widely recognized, regulatory authorities will place more emphasis on the reduction of error-inducing conditions in plants. It is therefore important that the Chemical Process Industries take the lead in developing a systematic approach and a defensible position in this area. 

Since the first synthesis of ammonia, catalyst development and chemical reaction engineering have been instrumental in the creation of the chemical process industry. As a result, catalytic processes have contributed much to the realization of prosperous civilizaticm. In the future, catalytic processes are expected to fulfill important roles in petroleum refining, diemical processing and environmental preservation. However, at present, many catalytic processes discharge large amounts of byproducts and consume large amounts of auxiliary raw materials. 

As the chemical process industries have developed more sophisticated ways to improve process safety, we have seen the introduction of safety management systems to augment process safety engineering activities. ... 

With the developed concepts, a number of field experiments were conducted in the chemical process industry. A first experiment was carried out in a small company in The Netherlands. From this first trial, it was evident that the concepts of precursors, the model of the organisational control process and the structure of these concepts had to be adapted to obtain better and more reliable results. The improvements led to the development of a structured protocol of seven clearly defined stages. By applying this 7-stage protocol to the data of the small company, safety risks could pro-actively be identified and the accidents which the company had already experienced, could be explained. 

To verify the developed concepts underlying the structured 7-stage protocol in a reactive way, they were applied to an analysis of recent accidents in the Dutch chemical process industry. Despite the limitations in the information available from the accident database, it could be deduced that all accidents were preceded by precursors, and even that similar precursors had led to similar accidents, implying that companies had failed to learn from these re-occurring deviations which were in fact pre-warning signs of impeding accidents. 

Having set the fundamental definitions in the field of safety research, this Section discusses how the determination of safety indicators developed over time, and why it is still possible for accidents to happen in the chemical process industry. 

Chapter 1 provided a general research area, where the problem of measuring safety pro-actively was identified in literature and in practice. This was done by sketching a recent accident and discussing how safety was measured in the past and currently. Moreover, it highlighted that the pro-active measurement of safety is still a problem in the chemical process industry. The development of substantially more understanding of how to pro-actively indicate accidents in the chemical process industry, was finally derived as the scope of this study and will be discussed in the remaining Chapters of this thesis. 

In this Chapter further evidence is provided that precursors exist long before they escalate into an accident. It will be demonstrated that the existence of precursor information could have been used to foresee and even prevent recent accidents with hazardous substances. Moreover, a set of precursors retrieved from 17 recent accidents in the Dutch chemical process industry is used to validate the 7-stage protocol developed in the previous Chapter. In spite of the limited accident information it is shown that if a proper control action had been initiated, all of these 17 accidents could have been prevented. 

The protocol developed in Chapter 5, which was applied on accidents as shown in Chapter 6, is applied on three cases in the Dutch chemical process industry. First, the cases are selected according the criteria stated in Chapter 5. Secondly, the developed protocol of analysis is applied on these selected cases, to identify why and how it is still possible that accidents may occur despite precursors and several existing safety barriers. Thirdly, the results from the analysis are further elaborated on, indicating the problems in current safety management systems, allowing accidents to occur. 

The catalytic gas detector was originally developed in 1958 for the mining industry. It has become the standard means of detection worldwide in virtually all oil and gas operations. It is also used extensively in coal extraction and the chemical process industry. 

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