Physical Integrity of a Plant

Process integrity addresses the reactions, physical chemistry, and dynamics of a plant s operation. If these are allowed to mn out of control or exceed standards, process conditions may exceed the mechanical design limits of the equipment. Some of the following approaches and methods used to assure process integrity are described in Guidelines for Technical Management of Chemical Process Safety (CCPS, 1989b) ... 

ABSTRACT In most cases, Model Based Safety Analysis (MBSA) of critical systems focuses only on the process and not on the control system of this process. For instance, to assess the dependability attributes of power plants, only a model (Fault Tree, Markov chain. ..) of the physical components of the plant (pumps, steam generator, turbine, alternator. ..) is used. In this paper, we claim that for repairable and/or phased-mission systems, not only the process but the whole closed-loop system Proc-ess/Control must be considered to perform a relevant MBSA. Indeed, a part of the control functions aims to handle the dynamical mechanisms that change the mission phase as well as manage repairs and redundancies in the process. Therefore, the achievement of these mechanisms depends on the functional/dysfunctional status of the control components, on which these functions are implemented. A qualitative or quantitative analysis method which considers both the process and the control provides consequently more realistic results by integrating the failures of the control components that may lead to the non-achievement of these mechanisms. This claim is exemplified on an industrial study case issued from a power plant. The system is modeled by a BDMP (Boolean logic Driven Markov Process), assuming first that the control components are faultless, i.e. only the faults in the process are considered, and afterwards that they may fail. The minimal cut sequences of the system are computed in both cases. The comparison of these two sets of minimal cut sequences shows the benefit of the second approach. 

The development and application of a rigorous model for a chemically reactive system typically involves four steps (1) development of a thermodynamic model to describe the physical and chemical equilibrium (2) adoption and use of a modeling framework to describe the mass transfer and chemical reactions (3) parameterization of the mass-transfer and kinetic models based upon laboratory, pilot-plant, or commercial-plant data and (4) use of the integrated model to optimize the process and perform equipment design. 

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