You are on page 1of 9

Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries


journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jlp

Inherent risk assessment methodology in preliminary design stage: A


case study for toxic release
Azmi Mohd Shariff*, Dzulkarnain Zaini
Process Safety Research Group, Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 31750 Tronoh, Perak, Malaysia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 20 October 2011
Received in revised form
2 November 2012
Accepted 17 December 2012

At preliminary design stage, process designers normally lack of information on the risk level from
process plant. An inherently safer process plant could be designed if the information of risk levels could
be known earlier at the preliminary design stage. If the risk level could be determined, there is a possibility to eliminate or reduce the risk by applying the well-known concept: inherent safety principle.
This paper presents a technique to determine the risk levels at preliminary process design stage using
a 2-region risk matrix concept. A model to calculate the severity and likelihood of a toxic release accident
was developed in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. This model is integrated with process design simulator,
iCON to allow for data transfer during preliminary design stage. 2-region risk matrix is proposed and
used to evaluate the acceptability of the inherent risk based on the severity and likelihood rating. If the
inherent risk level is unacceptable, modication for improvement can be done using the inherent safety
principles. A case study has been carried out to illustrate the benet of applying this newly developed
technique. It was successfully shown that an inherently safer plant could easily be designed by applying
this technique.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Inherent risk
Inherent safety
Risk matrix
Risk assessment
Inherently safer design

1. Introduction
Process safety must be measured and addressed in the whole
life cycle of a process system or a facility (Greenberg & Cramer,
1991). Many guidelines and procedures have been developed,
especially over the last three decades, with respect to risk assessment and safety of chemical process plants, which often include gas
plants, petrochemical plants, reneries, etc., by the industries
themselves, for instance, HAZOP by ICI, DOW Fire and Explosion
Index by DOW Chemicals (Leong & Shariff, 2008). Thus, risk
assessment and safety aspects of process plants should be given
a high priority, and have been further intensied after the Flixborough and the Bhopal incidents.
There are many established methodologies to identify, analyze,
prioritize and manage hazard arising from different stages of
a plant. For example, the CCPS (1996) of the American Institute of
Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has identied a number of hazards
analyses techniques and methodologies, which are deemed suitable for respective plant design stages. The recommendations are
shown in Fig. 1. Taylor (1994) also illustrated the safety program in
another perspective, which is shown in Fig. 2. The program includes

* Corresponding author. Tel.: 60 53687570; fax: 60 53656176.


E-mail addresses: azmish@petronas.com.my, afw6996@gmail.com (A.M. Shariff).
0950-4230/$ e see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jlp.2012.12.003

technical training of the personnel who will be operating and


maintaining the plant. It also covers safety analyses in the equipment procurement and construction stage (Leong & Shariff, 2008).
Nevertheless, chemical or process engineering often plays an
important part in the preliminary or conceptual design phase which
determines the process routes and main process parameters. The
accuracy of input from process engineering determines the outcome
of the design, including safety and environmental performance. For
example, a process design goes through the phases of a life cycle
such as research and development, design, construction, operation,
modication and nally decommissioning (Hurme & Rahman,
2005). The most important decisions on the process principle are
done in the process development and conceptual design phases that
give the best opportunities of implementing inherent safety (IS),
whereas added on safety has its applications in detailed process and
plant engineering. In fact, the possibility of implementing inherent
safety decreases as the design proceeds as illustrated in Fig. 3. Thus,
the inherent safety characteristics should be evaluated systematically as early as possible to gain large benets.
The application of IS in process design has been widely accepted
as a better technique to produce a safe process plant, without or with
minimum harm to the environment and health. The key principles
of IS are formalized by Kletz (1991) and summarized in Table 1.
In essence, IS aims to reduce or eliminate the root causes of the
hazards by modifying the design (hardware, controls, and operating

606

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Phase 1

Phase 2

Phase 3

Conceptual
Engineering

Basic
Engineering

Detailed
Engineering

1. Preliminary
Hazard
Analysis of
Project

1. Relative
Ranking e.g.
DOW Fire &
Explosion &
Chemical
Exposure
Index

Project
Stages

Hazard
Evaluation

1. Hazard and
Operability
(HazOp) Study
2. Failure Mode
and Effect
Analysis
(FMEA)

Phase 4

Phase 5

Equipment
Procurement
and
Construction

Commissioning

1. Check List
Review
2. What-if review

1. Pre-Startup
Safety Review
(PSSR)

Fig. 1. Hazard evaluation at various project stages (CCPS, 1996).

conditions) of the process plant itself instead of relying on additional


engineered safety systems and features, and procedural controls,
which can and do fail. Zwetsloot and Askounes Ashford (1999)
showed that the conventional approach alone is unable to avoid or
reduce the risk of serious chemical accidents, and this has been
further exemplied by the major incidents such as the Longford
Explosion, the Piper Alpha Explosion, and the Texas BP Renery
incident. Many publications included those from CCPS (2001),
Edwards and Lawrence (1993), Hendershot (2000), and Khan and
Amyotte (2002) concluded that inherently safer approach is a costoptimal option when considering the lifetime costs of a process
and its operation. According to Warwick (1998) and Crawley (2005),
the largest payoffs are achieved by verifying that inherent safety
principles have been considered early and often in the process and
engineering design sequence. Zwetsloot and Askounes Ashford
(1999) have proven that inherently safer options are also economically and technically viable for operating the plants.

evaluation, which is based mainly on the reaction parameters. The


rst published work was quantifying inherent safety of chemical
process routes by Lawrence (1996). Another proposed IS methodology is developed by Heikkila (1999). They have introduced the
fundamental concept of chemical process routes ranking based on
indices that function of pressure, temperature, composition, etc.
Palaniappan (2002) improved the original index systems and
introduced i-Safe in his research while Gupta and Edwards (2003)
developed a graphical method to measure IS. This graphical
method, however, is still based on existing principles proposed
earlier. Approximately, 25% of the respondents in a survey by Gupta
and Edwards (2003) stated that they were familiar with the concept of IS indices but did not use them because the IS indices were
too complicated, require a lot of data that need to be processed
manually, could not easily be used in early development stages and
therefore, a quicker method is needed. In 2004, Gentile (2004)
proposed a fuzzy logic based inherent safety index as an alternative technique.
In 2005, Rahman, Heikkila, and Hurme (2005) benchmarked
the 3 pioneering inherent indices (the PIIS, ISI and i-Safe) using the
methyl methacrylate (MMA) processes and weighted against the
expert opinion. The work concluded that IS evaluations can be
made in a reasonable accuracy with the developed indexing

2. Indices based inherent safety (IS) methodologies


A number of researchers have proposed various methodologies
for IS assessment. Majority of the IS assessment developed currently are focused on the indexing technique for process route

Feasibility
Studies

Conceptual
Design

Detail
Design

Safety
Concept

Construction

Commissioning

Construction Safety
Analyses

Operations

As Built
Risk Analyses

Quantitative Risk
Studies
HAZOP

Operator and Maintenance


Procedure Analyses

Structural
Reliability Analysis

Safety and Emergency


Training
Quality Assurance of
Safety Equipment

Economic Risk
Assessment

Fig. 2. A full program of safety analysis (Taylor, 1994).

Follow up

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Fig. 3. The design impossibility and inherently safer design (Hurme & Rahman, 2005).

technique. Khan and Amyotte (2005) proposed a structured guide


word based approach similar to HAZOP technique known as integrated inherent safety index (I2SI). The developed index was
intended to be applied throughout the life cycle of process design.
The index based approach is also used by Leong and Shariff (2008)
in the development of an inherent safety index module (ISIM). ISIM
developed in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is integrated with HYSYS
for simplicity of data transfer (Shariff, Rusli, Chan, Radhakrishanan,
& Buang, 2005). The purpose of integration is to capitalize the
spreadsheet calculation capability and its ability to communicate
with the process design simulator via Visual Basic for Application
(VBA) language. Another inherent safety index based approach
known as the process route index (PRI) (Leong & Shariff, 2009) is
developed based on the fundamental process parameters that inuence the outcome of an explosion incident that used similar
integration technique. With the integration, assessment of inherent
safety can be carried out efciently. Recently, a new index which is
designed to calculate and compare the level of IS of process streams
during simulation work at preliminary design stage known as
a process stream index (PSI) is published by Shariff, Leong, and
Zaini (2012). Although the evaluation of inherent safety by indices approach has been widely explored and proposed at preliminary design stage, this approach is highly dependable on the
scoring technique, and the end-users experience. The indices
methods are still needed to be improved for the acceptability of
industries for the application at the preliminary design stage.
3. Using risk assessment concept for inherently safer design
CCPS (2000) has established a general Quantitative Risk
Assessment (QRA) guideline for individuals, organization or companies in order to suit with their respective needs as illustrated in
Fig. 4. Generally, for a QRA to be meaningful, it is carried out after
signicant process design, and main equipment layout had been
completed. The QRA has been widely used in industries but not at
preliminary design stage as the add-on control measures are not
available for the assessment of the risk level. This information is

607

available once the detailed design has been completed prior to


construction. Therefore, the inherent risk assessment is rarely
implemented due to the unavailability of add-on control measures
at the early design phase (Khan & Amyotte, 2005).
A pioneering concept on Inherent Risk Assessment (IRA) to
evaluate inherent risk of an explosion by using 2-region FeN curve
was developed by Shariff and Leong (2009). They have shown that an
inherently safer process plant could be designed if the risk level is
obtained earlier at the preliminary design stage. Thus, the risk level
could be eliminated or reduced by implementing the inherent risk
assessment couple with the inherent safety principle to produce
inherently safer process design. A similar approach to assess inherent risk assessment is proposed in this paper by using a risk matrix
concept. This concept assists the process designers in differentiating
the risk acceptability levels of the process design that may results in
loss of life, equipment failure and environmental damage. Unlike
QRA, this concept does not require safety control measures such as
procedures and instrumented protective functions. It merely reects
the inherent risk due to the inherent properties of the chemicals
involved and process conditions of the design.
This concept can be easily implemented at simulation design if
the process design simulator such as HYSYS and iCON is integrated
with inherent risk assessment model. Data from the process design
simulator can be automatically transferred to the risk models hence
avoiding the tedious manual data transfer and reducing chances of
error. Integrating with the process design simulator, the inherent
risk and inherently safer design options can be quickly evaluated in
a short time. Due to the different requirements and purpose, IRA is
not to replace QRA, but to complement the implementation of the
risk concept at the preliminary design stage (Shariff & Leong, 2009).
4. Inherent risk assessment using 2-region risk matrix
The similar 2-region concept for FeN curve by Shariff and Leong
(2009) is adopted in this work. However, a slight modication is
proposed since their work was focusing on explosion using FeN
Define potential accident
scenarios

Evaluate the event


consequences

Estimate the potential


accident frequencies

Estimate the event impacts

Estimate the risk


Table 1
General principle of inherent safety (Kletz, 1991).
Principle

Denition

Minimize Use smaller quantities of hazardous substances


(also called intensication)
Substitute Replace a material with a less hazardous substance
Moderate Use less hazardous conditions, a less hazardous form of a
material, or facilities that minimize the impact of a release of
hazardous material or energy (also called attenuation and limitation)
Simplify Design facilities which eliminate unnecessary complexity and make
operating errors less likely, and which are forgiving of errors that
are made (also called error tolerance)

Evaluate the risk

Identify and prioritize


potential risk reduction
measures
Fig. 4. Quantitative risk assessment (QRA) owchart (CCPS, 2000).

608

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Fig. 5. 2-region risk matrix.

Process Design Simulator

Input from
User

Integrated data transfer, analysis and


interface between process design simulator
with inherent risk assessment spreadsheet

Estimation of severity for


undesired toxic release
event

Estimation of likelihood for


the undesired event

Modification based
on Inherent Safety
(IS) principle

Evaluation of inherent
Yes risk
level using 2-region risk matrix

Risk Acceptable?

NO

YES
User proceed with design

Fig. 6. Framework of toxicity inherent risk assessment (TRIRA).

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

609

Table 2
Comparison between QRA and TRIRA.
Criteria

QRA

TRIRA

Stage to be applied

Coarse (preliminary) QRA during Front End Engineering Design (FEED)


and detailed QRA during operation stage
To measure risk for credible major accident events and benchmark
against regulatory requirement in order to manage the risk to ALARP

During preliminary design/simulation stage

Purpose

Regulatory requirements Required by regulatory agencies, for example Department of Occupational


Safety & Health in Malaysia and the Health and Safety Executive in the UK
Information required
Process & instrumentation diagrams (P&ID), process conditions, reliability
data, and historical weather data
Scenario
Only few credible scenario including worst case to be studied in detail
Duration of analysis
Relatively long depending on the size of the plant
Result representation

To proactively identify risk, inherent to the design intention


based on the developed risk matrix and manage the risk by
adopting inherent safety principles
No regulatory requirement

Simulation data on process conditions, approximate reliability


data, piping and equipment sizing
Worst case scenario
Relatively quick as it is carried out in parallel with simulation
work
3-region FrequencyeNumber (FeN) curve covering tolerable, tolerable with 2-region risk matrix covering acceptable and unacceptable
ALARP, and intolerable regions
regions

curve technique. In this work, a pioneering 2-region risk matrix is


introduced for toxic release hazard as given in Fig. 5. The framework to asses the inherent risk assessment together with the
design improvement in the case of toxic release is given in Fig. 6.
This technique is named as the toxic release inherent risk assessment (TRIRA).
The 2-region risk matrix is introduced in TRIRA because during
preliminary design stage, safety measures and control mechanisms
are yet in place to reduce the risk to As Low as Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). Key comparisons of TRIRA technique and QRA are
presented in Table 2. The useful information available at this preliminary design stage in order to assess the inherent risk of the
toxic release is based on the process conditions of the materials in
the process plant. The process conditions can be obtained from the
process design simulator such as HYSYS, iCON, etc. The severity of
the released materials can be determined by referring to the consequence due to the toxic release accident. The analysis of consequence due to the toxic release accident at preliminary design
stage was explained by Shariff and Zaini (2010). The impact of
consequence can be based on the toxic effect criteria and standard
promulgated by several government agencies and private associations. In this work, the Acute Exposure Guidelines Levels (AEGLs) as
given in Table 3 are used for severity rating since it provides
established multiple exposure periods ranging from minutes to
hours (EPA, 2001; NRC, 2001).
Risk is the product of severity and likelihood. The likelihood is
an event likely to occur within a specic period (DOSH, 2008). In
this work, fault tree analysis developed in the spreadsheet based on
the technique by Hussan and Mohd Shariff (2008) is used for the
likelihood. Once the probabilistic assessment of the top event of the
fault tree has been determined, the likelihood rating then can be
obtained from Table 4. The likelihood rating was based on the
technique by MIL-STD-882D (US Department of Defense, 2000).
In this work, 6  3 cell is used for the 2-region risk matrix that
has 6 different levels of likelihood and 3 different levels of severity
to generate outputs in the form of inherent risk level of toxic release.
The regions are divided into ACCEPTABLE and UNACCEPTABLE. If the

Table 4
Likelihood ratings (US Department of Defense, 2000).
Likelihood of occurrence

Likelihood of event occurring/year

Very high
High
Moderate
Low
Very low
Unlikely

100
101
102
103
104
105








P
P
P
P
P
P

>
>
>
>
>
>

101
102
103
104
105
106

inherent risk of a process design condition falls into unacceptable


risk region, then design improvement can be done using inherent
safety principles in order to improve the design to the acceptable
region. Eventually, 2-region risk matrix could assist process designers in differentiating the acceptability levels of the design that
may results in loss of life, equipment failure and environmental
damage. This 2-region matrix approach was designed to ensure that
process designer not only able to evaluate the risk involved in the
process, but could also identify the possible solution to eliminate or
reduce the hazards and produce an inherently safer process design
during preliminary design stage.
5. Case study e risk reduction using moderation principle of
inherent safety
In order to show the capability of TRIRA to reduce the severity
and likelihood incident of toxic release during preliminary design

Table 3
Severity ratings (EPA, 2001; NRC, 2001).
Severity level Observed effect
AEGL-1
AEGL-2
AEGL-3

Level above which non-disabling, reversible discomfort may be


noted
Level above which more serious effects may occur including
possible long-lasting or escape-impairing effects
Level above which exposures may become life threatening or
result in death
Fig. 7. Purication column from ammonia plant (Shariff & Zaini, 2010).

610

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Name
Description
Upstream Op
Downstream Op
VapFrac
T [C]
P [kPa]
MoleFlow/Composition
HYDROGEN
AMMONIA
NITROGEN
Total
MassFlow [kg/h]
VolumeFlow [m3/hr]
StdLiqVolumeFlow
[m3/hr]
StdGasVolumeFlow
[SCMD]
Energy [W]
H [kJ/kmol]
S [kJ/kmol-K]
MolecularWeight
MassDensity [kg/m3]
Cp [kJ/kmol-K]
ThermalConductivity
[W/m-K]
Viscosity [Pa-s]
molarV [m3/kmol]
ZFactor

a)

Stream1

Purification_Column.In
1.00
400.0
800.00
Fraction
kgmole/h
240.00
0.2000
840.00
0.7000
120.00
0.1000
1.00
1200.00
18151.00
8371.666
48.787
6.8228E+5
7.896E+6
23689.2
199.923
15.13
2.1682
42.237
0.1118
2.4859E-5
6.976
0.9978

iCON- MS Excel Graphical User


Interface (GUI)
Total Number of streams
Number of Components
Units Set
Streams
VapFrac
T
P
MoleFlow
MassFlow
VolumeFlow
Energy
H
S
MolecularWeight.generic
MassDensity
Cp
Cv
ThermalConductivity
Viscosity
molarV
ZFactor.generic

b)

Load iCON Case

Streams Summary

1
3
SI

C
kPa
kgmole/h
kg/h
m3/hr
W
kJ/kmol
kJ/kmol-K

Stream1
1.0000
400.00
800.00
1200.00
18151.00
8371.67
7896393.17
23689.18
199.92

kg/m3
kJ/kmol-K
kJ/kmol-K
W/m-K
Pa-s
m3/kmol

2.17
42.24
33.80
0.11
0.00
6.98

Data from iCON MS Excel Graphical User Interface

Data from iCON


Fig. 8. Data extracted from iCON simulation to Microsoft Excel.

stage, a slightly modied case study from Shariff and Zaini (2010)
was used. This case study was based on the worst-case accident
scenario on pipeline rupture for purication column in a typical
ammonia production plant, and the schematic diagram is given in
Fig. 7. It was assumed that a maximum concentration will occur at
the center of the puff cloud from the release of pipeline rupture,
and it occurs in 10-min durations (Crowl & Louvar, 2002). The
design intention for this purication column was to have an
acceptable inherent risk condition for the residence at 1200 m from
the plant in the case of pipeline rupture. If the inherent risk value is
UNACCEPTABLE, the inherent safety principles will be used to
reduce the inherent risk to the ACCEPTABLE level.
TRIRA was used to extract data from process design simulator
iCON to MS-Excel in order to determine the severity value of
ammonia release at 1200 m. This is the distance for the 10-min
duration of the accidental released in the case of the worst condition. The design criterion of the plant was decided to be in
ACCEPTABLE region in the case of accidental released by referring
to 2-region risk matrix table as given in Fig. 6. The extracted data

from ICON to TRIRA is shown in Fig. 8. The analysis of the streams


shown that the pressure of the inlet Stream 1 was quite high
(800 kPa) that could cause high concentration of toxic gas release in
the case of pipeline rupture due to overpressure. In this case, the
calculated amount of ammonia released was 538 ppm as shown in
Fig. 9 with the severity rating of AEGL-2 as given in Table 3. In order
to obtain risk, the likelihood estimation must be determined and in
this case, the likelihood estimation was done based on a typical
fault tree analysis for pipeline rupture developed by Khan and
Abbasi (2000) and Khan et al. (2001). The fault tree development
might vary from others based on the process requirements of the
plant. The incident likelihood was calculated to be 3.97  102/year
as given in Fig. 10 with the rating of the likelihood as HIGH as
shown in Table 4 caused by pipeline rupture due to overpressure.
The resulted risk factor is given as B2, which is UNACCEPTABLE as
referring to Fig. 11.
Based on the understanding of uid mechanic principle, the
amount of mass owing through a hole is a function of density, area
of the hole and pressure differential between a system and the

Fig. 9. Data from severity estimation component before lowering the inlet pressure P.

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

611

Fig. 10. Typical fault tree analysis for pipeline rupture from incident likelihood estimation component (Khan & Abbasi, 2000; Khan & Amyotte, 2002; Khan et al., 2001).

surrounding. Hence, pressure is one of the possible factors that


could give a high concentration level that inuenced the released
concentration once it dispersed into the atmosphere (Crowl &
Louvar, 2002). Then, the potential mitigation for this case is using
the moderation concept from the inherent safety principle by
lowering the pressure of Stream 1 that could reduce the severity
and the likelihood of consequence. Moderation means that using
less hazardous condition and minimizes the impact of a hazardous
material released. In order to meet the design criterion, the pressure has been reduced until the risk level reach to ACCEPTABLE. It
was determined that the design criterion is met once the pressure
lowered to 400 kPa. According to Haber (Afghan, 2011), using
a pressure of around 400 kPa and temperature of about 400  C is
a compromised design to achieve an acceptable yield of ammonia (10e20%) without having the risk of an accident due to

overpressure; therefore, the cost and safety concerns during operation of the plant can be minimized. At this pressure, the calculated
amount of ammonia released was 119 ppm as given in Fig. 12 with
the severity rating of AEGL-1 as referring to Table 3. Since the
overpressure is no longer an issue, thus a modied fault tree is
developed as shown in Fig. 13. The incident likelihood was reduced
to 4.5  105/year, and the likelihood rating is VERY LOW as shown
in Table 4. The potential risk after the mitigation is now at the
ACCEPTABLE region as shown in Fig. 14 with the risk factor of A5.
From this case study, it can be concluded that the implementation of inherent safety principle in TRIRA has improved the
process plant safety at preliminary design stage. Besides, other alternatives of inherent safety principle such as minimization, substitution and simplication technique can also be used to assure the
overall design objective is met. However, it is worth noting that any

Fig. 11. Risk matrix before reducing the inlet pressure P and incident likelihood.

612

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

Fig. 12. Data from severity estimation component after lowering the inlet pressure P.

Fig. 13. Modied fault tree analysis for pipeline rupture from incident likelihood estimation component.

Fig. 14. Risk matrix after reducing the inlet pressure P and incident likelihood.

A.M. Shariff, D. Zaini / Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries 26 (2013) 605e613

modications made using this technique at preliminary design


stage should not give any major deviation from overall design target (Chan, 2008).
The case study presented here is only for the case of pipeline
rupture. A more rigorous inherent risk assessment should cover all
items in the process ow sheet, including major unit operations
such as distillation, absorption, adsorption, membrane, etc. One of
the major challenges of using TRIRA is it requires the size of unit
operations for the assessment of inherent risk. Unfortunately, the
size of equipment is not provided by the process design simulator
at the preliminary design stage. Therefore, major improvement can
be done for TRIRA by the inclusion of conceptual models to estimate the size of unit operations, which will be the future work of
this research. The impact on project economics should also be
assessed since the benet due to the improvement on inherent
safety might come with certain trade off (Edwards & Lawrence,
1993).
6. Conclusion
This paper proposed and demonstrated an evolution of concept
to quantify risk, which is inherent to the process plant at preliminary in design stage. It is done by using an inherent risk
assessment which is integrated with the process design simulator
to allow for data transfer. 2-region risk matrix is proposed and used
to evaluate the acceptability of the inherent risk based on the
severity and likelihood estimation components. A case study has
been carried out to illustrate the benet of implementing this
technique. As a conclusion, while safety is of highest importance,
the impact from the process conditions, composition and cost of
modication needs to be considered.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank Y-UTP 15-8209-011 project
fund that makes this project achievable.
References
Afghan Energy. (2011). http://www.nawabi.de/chemical/ammonia.asp Accessed
18.04.11.
Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). (1996). Guidelines for hazard evaluation
procedures (2nd ed.). New York: American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). (2000). Guidelines for chemical process
quantitative risk analysis (2nd ed.). New York: American Institute of Chemical
Engineers.
Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS). (2001). Layer of protection analysis e
Simplied process risk assessment. New York: American Institute of Chemical
Engineers.
Chan, T. L. (2008). Inherent safety intervention framework. Ph.D. thesis, Universiti
Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia.
Crawley, P. (2005). Offshore loss prevention. The Chemical Engineer, (July), 23e25.
Crowl, D. A., & Louvar, J. F. (2002). Chemical process safety: Fundamentals with applications. Eaglewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) Malaysia. (2008). Guidelines
for hazard identication risk assessment and risk control (HIRARC).
Edwards, D. W., & Lawrence, D. (1993). Assessing the inherent safety of chemical
process routes: is there a relation between plant costs and inherent safety?
Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 71, 252e258.

613

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (2001). National advisory committee for


acute exposure guideline levels (AEGLs) for hazardous substances: proposed
AEGL values. Federal Register, 65(51), 14186e14197.
Gentile, M. (2004). Development of hierarchical fuzzy model for the evaluation of
inherent safety. Ph.D. thesis, Texas A&M University, USA.
Greenberg, H. H., & Cramer, J. J. (1991). Risk assessment and risk management for the
chemical process industries. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Gupta, J. P., & Edwards, D. W. (2003). A simple graphical method for measurement
of inherent safety. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 104(1), 15e30.
Heikkila, A. M. (1999). Inherent safety in process plant design. Ph.D. thesis, Helsinki
University of Technology, Espoo, Finland.
Hendershot, D. C. (2000). Process minimization: making plants safer. Chemical
Engineering Progress, 96, 35e40.
Hurme, M., & Rahman, M. (2005). Implementing inherent safety throughout process lifecycle. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 18, 238e244.
Hussan, N. A., & Mohd Shariff, A. (2008). Fault tree analysis using Microsoft Excel:
a case study of offshore compression platform. In Hazardous area conference e IDC
technologies.
Khan, F. I., & Abbasi, S. A. (2000). Analytical simulation and PROFAT II: a new
methodology and a computer automated tool for fault tree analysis in chemical
process industries. Journal of Hazardous Materials, A75, 1e27.
Khan, F. I., & Amyotte, P. R. (2002). Inherent safety in offshore oil and gas activities:
a review of the present status and future directions. Journal of Loss Prevention in
the Process Industries, 15, 279e289.
Khan, F. I., & Amyotte, P. R. (2005). I2SI: a comprehensive quantitative tool for
inherent safety and cost evaluation. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process
Industries, 18, 310e326.
Khan, F. I., Iqbal, A., Ramesh, N., & Abbasi, S. A. (2001). SCAP: a new methodology for
safety management based on feedback from credible accident-probabilistic
fault tree analysis system. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 87, 23e56.
Kletz, T. A. (1991). Plant design for safety e A user friendly approach (2nd ed.).
Butterworth Heinemann.
Lawrence, D. (1996). Quantifying inherent safety of chemical process route. Ph.D.
thesis, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK.
Leong, C. T., & Shariff, A. M. (2008). Inherent Safety Index Module (ISIM) to assess
inherent safety level during preliminary design stage. Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 86(2), 113e119.
Leong, C. T., & Shariff, A. M. (2009). Process Route Index (PRI) to assess level of
explosiveness for inherent safety quantication. Journal of Loss Prevention in the
Process Industries, 22, 216e221.
National Research Council (NRC). (2001). Standing operating procedures for developing acute exposure guideline levels for hazardous chemicals. Washington, D.C:
Subcommittee on Acute Exposure Guideline Levels, Committee on Toxicology,
National Research Council, National Academy Press.
Palaniappan, C. (2002). Expert system for design of inherently safer chemical processes.
M. Eng. thesis, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Rahman, M., Heikkila, A. M., & Hurme, M. (2005). Comparison of inherent safety
indices in process concept evaluation. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process
Industries, 18, 327e334.
Shariff, A. M., & Leong, C. T. (2009). Inherent Risk Assessment (IRA) e a new concept
to evaluate risk in preliminary design stage. Process Safety and Environmental
Protection, 87, 371e376.
Shariff, A. M., Leong, C. T., & Zaini, D. (2012). Using Process Stream Index (PSI) to
assess inherent safety level during preliminary design stage. Safety Science, 50,
1098e1103.
Shariff, A. M., Rusli, R., Chan, T. L., Radhakrishanan, V. R., & Buang, A. (2005).
Inherent safety tool for explosion consequences study. Journal of Loss Prevention
in the Process Industries, 19(5), 409e418.
Shariff, A. M., & Zaini, D. (2010). Toxic Release Consequence Analysis Tool (TORCAT) for inherently safer design plant. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 182,
394e402.
Taylor, J. R. (1994). Risk analysis for process plant, pipelines and transport. UK: E&FN
Spon.
US Department of Defense. (2000). System safety program requirement. DC US
Department of Defense, MIL-STD-882D.
Warwick, A. R. (1998). Inherent safety design of oating production, storage and
ofoading vessels (FPSOs). In Proceedings of off-shore mechanics and artic engineering conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
Zwetsloot, G. I. J. M., & Askounes Ashford, N. (1999). In A. Amendola, & D. Wilkinson
(Eds.), Encouraging inherently safer production in European rms: A report from
the eld [special issue], risk assessment and environmental decision making.
Journal of Hazardous Materials, Vol. 78(1e3) (pp. 123e144).

You might also like