Hazard analysis potential damages

Process Safety Analysis This part treats the analysis of a process or project from the standpoint of hazards, risks, procedures for making potential damage estimates, and project reviews and audits. It can be helpful to management in assessing risks in a project. It consists of the following ... 

Hazard analysis can be described as investigating an accident before it occurs. The goal is to identify potential causes of accidents, that is, scenarios that can lead to losses, so they can be eliminated or controlled in design or operations before damage occurs. 

Once the hazards were identified, the severity of each hazard was evaluated by considering the worst-case loss associated with the hazard. In the example, the losses are evaluated for each of three categories humans (H), mission (M), and equipment (E). Initially, potential damage to the Earth and planet surface environment was included in the hazard log. In the end, the environment component was left out of the analysis because project managers decided to replace the analysis with mandatory compliance with NASA s planetary protection standards. A risk analysis can be replaced by a customer policy on how the hazards are to be treated. A more complete example, however, for a different system would normally include environmental hazards. 

Preliminary Hazard Analysis—Conducted to identify potential hazards and prioritize them according to (1) the likelihood of an accident or injury being caused by the hazard and (2) the severity of injury, illness, and/or property damage that could result if the hazard caused an accident. 

The fuel gas to a fired heater is controlled by a BPCS control function (function TIC-1), which throttles a fuel control valve, CV-1, as shown in Figure F-3. A hazard analysis was performed to identify process hazards and to determine whether the safeguards were sufficient to mitigate the process hazards. The team determined that when the heater was firing hard, a low-pass flow through the tubes could result in a high firebox temperature with the potential for tube rupture, furnace fire and structural damage to the furnace. 

To complete a hazard analysis after a hazard has been identified and its potential for harm has been evaluated, the exposure must be assessed. An exposure assessment would determine the number of people, the extent of the property, and the aspects of the environment in a particular setting that could be affected by the realization of the hazard and the extent of harm or damage that could result. 

Hazard analysis focuses on the study of characteristics of a fire and its impact on humans and property at the set scenario, which includes a set of basic data on room geometry, parameters for the center of the fire, conditions of ventilating apertures, a starting position of people in the building, etc. Here, deterministic mathematical (integrated, zonal or differential) or physical (full-scale or reduced in sizes) fire models are used. Research focuses on quantitative data, environment characteristics of fire and explosion scenarios, its striking action and potential property damage. 

The concept of risk should be clearly defined and should be included as a major element in the job hazard analysis (JHA) process. Using only loss-related data that is solely based on injuries, incident rates and/or damage does not provide a fioll understanding of the potential for loss-producing events. 

The Chemical Process Industry (CPI) uses various quantitative and qualitative techniques to assess the reliability and risk of process equipment, process systems, and chemical manufacturing operations. These techniques identify the interactions of equipment, systems, and persons that have potentially undesirable consequences. In the case of reliability analyses, the undesirable consequences (e.g., plant shutdown, excessive downtime, or production of off-specification product) are those incidents which reduce system profitability through loss of production and increased maintenance costs. In the case of risk analyses, the primary concerns are human injuries, environmental impacts, and system damage caused by occurrence of fires, explosions, toxic material releases, and related hazards. Quantification of risk in terms of the severity of the consequences and the likelihood of occurrence provides the manager of the system with an important decisionmaking tool. By using the results of a quantitative risk analysis, we are better able to answer such questions as, Which of several candidate systems poses the least risk Are risk reduction modifications necessary and What modifications would be most effective in reducing risk ... 

In the final phase of risk analysis—risk characterization—one integrates outputs of effects and exposure assessments. Risk is expressed in qualitative or quantitative estimates by comparison with reference values (e.g., hazard quotient). The severity of potential or actual damage should be characterized with the degree of uncertainty of risk estimates. Assumptions, data uncertainties and limitations of analyses are to be described clearly and reflected in the conclusions. The final product is a report that communicates to the affected and interested parties the analysis findings (Byrd and Cothern, 2000). 

A hazard can be defined as a situation or action that has potential for injury, damage to property, harm to the environment, or all three. Once the hazard identification process is complete and the hazards have been analyzed, a risk analysis follows. 

A type of risk analysis that considers the particular effects of a particular process failure and the damage caused by these effects. It is undertaken to evaluate potentially serious hazardous outcomes of incidents and their possible consequences for individuals and the environment. 

An evaluation of both the frequency and the consequences of potential hazardous events to make a logical decision on whether the installation of a particular safety measure can be justified on safety and loss control grounds. Frequency and consequences are usually combined to produce a measure of risk, which can be expressed as the average loss per year in terms of injury or damage arising from an incident. The risk calculations of different design alternatives can be compared to determine the safest and most economical options. Calculated risk may be compared to set criteria that have been accepted by society or required by laws. See also Qualitative Risk Analysis. 

Multiple pressure tube rupture events are BDBAs. In this case, the potential hazards are loss of reactor cavity integrity and damage to the metal structures of the reactor. To define the scope of an MPTR beyond which there is the threat of reactor cavity destruction, it is necessary to perform an analysis of the venting capacity of the system for reactor cavity protection against overpressure. The results of this analysis are needed in assessing the consequences of the BDBA leading to an MPTR. 

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