DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF PROCESS SAFETY INDICES IN EARLY DESIGN PHASE OF CHEMICAL SUPPLY CHAIN
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Date
2018-08-06
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Abstract
Supply chain network design and optimization are very important in decision making, which gives the ability to stakeholders to assess the massive supply chains to increase profit while minimizing risks. Risks in supply chains arise from various sources such as demand, supply and manufacturing. One of the significant sources is the supply chain disruptions caused by chemical and process hazards during the transportation, manufacturing and storage of chemicals. Process safety engineering is the study of hazards and risks in the chemical process industry and deals with the prevention and mitigation of the risks. The concept of process safety has grown exponentially during the last two decades.
Risk analysis techniques such as Hazard and Operability (HazOp) Analysis and Layer of Protection Analysis (LOPA) are well-established. However, they need large amounts of information that is not available during early design. Several quantitative and semi-quantitative safety indices such as Inherent Safety Index and Dow Fire and Explosion Index have been published which can be used at early design. But, there is a need for classification and critical analyses of these indices for correct usage. This study presents a critical discussion of published indices which includes classification into categories such as application industry, input type, and model aggregation; and lists advantages and disadvantages of each index. This will help researchers and engineers select correct safety index for their application.
Supply chain is a part of product life-cycle. Often, supply chain analysis overlooks the hazards at consumer level. Several of the products used every day such as propane grills, batteries, and spot removers are hazardous if not used properly. This study shows a systematic way of analyzing injuries due to hazardous consumer products. A brief introduction of propane supply chain is presented. NEISS database has been analyzed for consumer propane injuries and several recommendations have been derived for the consumer propane market. It was inferred that there is a lack of awareness of hazards of propane products at home, which result in high number of injuries to face due to flash burns.
Quantification of chemical and process hazard is necessary in decision making and is one of the challenges faced by the chemical process industry. Moreover, due to the complexities of the process and limited understanding of the chemicals, the risk and hazards posed are uncertain in nature. This study develops a novel framework of holistically analyzing supply chain network design and process safety. This work shows how the hazards in the supply chain drive the upper bounds on the flow for each entity in the supply chain. Secondly, the general supply chain formulation has been revised to integrate these bounds. The supply chain formulation described here is a non-linear mixed integer programming (MINLP) model with a case study in ammonia supply chain. The results show that in a chemical supply chain profit is an increasing function of hazard bounds.
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process safety index, supply chain optimization