| dc.description.abstract | In traditional industrial process design approaches, techno-economic criteria have been the primary objectives in the early process design stages. Safety is often considered only in the later design stage (e.g., detailed engineering stage). Such a traditional approach is that most of the design degrees of freedom, including technology and configuration issues, have already been determined when considering safety. Modifying a process is costly or unreliable at later stages. To solve this issue, there have been numerous attempts to consider process safety during the early design stages in safety engineers and researchers. In particular, special attention to adopting inherently safer design (ISD) has been made because ISD is deemed the most cost-effective risk reduction strategy at early design stages. However, it is still challenging to adopt ISD for process engineers at the early design stages because of the lack of guidance and insufficient information on upcoming process facilities.
To address this challenge, this dissertation consists of three peer-reviewed journal papers [Articles #1 - #3]. With respect to the progress of inherently safer design (in particular, during the early design stage) over the last three decades, Article #1 selects 73 inherent safety assessment tools, which can be utilized during the early design stages, and categorized into three groups: hazard-based inherent safety assessment tools (H-ISATs) for 22 tools, risk-based inherent safety assessment tools (R-ISATs) for 33 tools, and cost-optimal inherent safety assessment tools (CO-ISATs) for 18 tools. The goal of this article is to enable process engineers to use all the available design degrees of freedom to mitigate risk early enough in the design process.
Article #2 analyzes 94 chemical process incidents investigated by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) reports. To analyze in a systematic approach, this article proposes 17 incident cause factors, 6 scenario factors, and 6 consequence factors to find out whether ISD would have helped to prevent these incidents.
Article #3 proposes hands-on predictive models of the flash point, the heat of combustion, lower flammability limit (LFL), and upper flammability limit (UFL). By incorporating the nonlinearity and transformation along with linearity of variables, this article constructed practical, reliable regression models thoroughly with readily available variables—the number of all atoms, molecular weights, and boiling points. The purpose is to enable a process engineer to quickly obtain hazardous properties of intended process materials. | |
