Risk, process plant building safety

These process safety management systems help ensure that facilities are designed, constructed, operated, and maintained with appropriate controls in place to prevent serious accidents. However, despite these precautions, buildings close to hazardous process plants have presented serious risks to the people who work in them. This observation is prompted by the fact that some buildings, because of their design and construction, have collapsed when subjected to comparatively moderate accidental explosions, with serious injury or fatality to the occupants. Conversely, experience indicates that personnel located outdoors and away from such buildings, if subjected to the same blast, may have a lower likelihood of serious injury or fatality. 

Safe unit placement enhances the overall safety of a pilot plant. A containment cell or a separate building is not, however, a guarantee of safety. Other measures include Increased process monitoring of safety specific variables, limiting inventories of hazardous feedstocks and products, detailed hazard analysis and risk assessments, and good design practices. One essential element is to ensure that the pilot plant has adequate space to support its operation. This requires a careful evaluation of the required space before the unit is constructed. While a detailed layout and a careful... 

In this section, a safety dataset, resulting from over 20 years of practical experience with risk analysis of chemical processes, is presented. These data build the base of risk analysis in the fine chemicals and pharmaceutical industries, essentially in multi-purpose plants. Therefore, the dataset introduces plant considerations only at its end. This allows exchanging them without any need for recollecting the whole dataset, in cases where the process is transferred from one plant unit to another. Moreover, this dataset may be used in the frame of different risk analysis methods. 

The reason to build models of reacting processes is to increase laboratory safety and to reduce the number of experiments required in the laboratory and pilot plant. If we do not want to separate BR and LR from P, then we must determine the operating conditions which yield that result. We can determine those operating conditions via experimentation, which is time consuming and involves some risk of mishap, or we can determine the necessary operating conditions via calculation using a process model. 

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