INVESTIGADORES
BANDONI Jose Alberto
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
QUANTIFICATION TOOLS IN INHERENTLY SAFER DESIGN
Autor/es:
S. TONELLI, M. RIFAI, A. BANDONI
Lugar:
Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Reunión:
Congreso; ENPROMER 2005; 2005
Resumen:
In the last years, more rigorous environmental regulations and public concern about technological risks has led chemical plant designers to pay special attention to all aspects related to safety. This matter is two fold. First, the traditional method involves the use of safety devices or control procedures added in the last design stages to deal with the identified hazards. On the other hand, in inherent safety, the risks associated to process materials and operations are reduced or eliminated permanently. The emphasis is placed on avoiding or limiting hazard sources rather than introducing add-on protective barriers to control them. The interest in inherently safer design has grown along the nineties because this methodology seems likely to be the most cost-efficient strategy to loss prevention. However, in spite of being an attractive approach, it is not widely used yet. Some reasons for this may be the fact that the industry is still more familiarized with conventional safety strategies and many of the proposed methodologies are not so simple to be implemented easily. Nevertheless, the lack of systematic tools to apply inherent safety principles is perhaps the most important cause. Many papers have recently been published attempting to deal with this drawback (Gentile et al. (2003), Khan et al. (2003), Gupta and Edwards (2003), Palaniappan et al. (2002a; 2002b)). In this context, this paper presents a state-of-the-art review of the existing indexes to evaluate and compare different alternatives in inherently safer design (INSET Toolkit, Overall Inherent Safety Index, Inherent Safety Index, Fuzzy Based Inherent Safety Index, Integrated Inherent Safety Index, etc.). The extent of their applications is discussed as well as their strengths and weaknesses using a literature case study. To provide a common basis for this analysis, the concepts involved in each index are applied to select safer process alternatives for acrylic acid production.