In small low risk plants it is easy to reveal potential hazards within the process. However, if the process is complex or there is the possibility of a disaster should there be a problem in the process, a more powerful hazard analysis method should be used. There are several wide accepted methods, such as:
- What-If Analysis
- Checklist
- Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP)
- Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
- Fault Tree Analysis
- Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA)
What is a HAZOP study?
A HAZOP Study is the most commonly used process hazard analysis method. It is an analysis process that include the elements of risk assessment but follows through in great detail to ensure all possible operating (among many elements) deviations are recognized the associated risks assessed and action are put in place (and completed , part of the process) to ensure all risks identified are suitably mitigated. It can be used to identify operability problems even during the early stages of project development, as well as identifying potential hazards in operating systems.
What is QRA?
Quantitative Risk Assessment is a process by which results of risk analysis are used to make decisions either through relative ranking of risk reduction strategies or through comparison with risk targets.
What you get from a risk analysis and assessment study?
- Analysis of potential accident scenarios, including consequences and initiating and controlling factors
- Estimated fatalities (individual, group and societal risk)
- Predicted economic losses
- Predicted environmental impacts
- Risk to specific main safety functions
- Input to operational restrictions and design requirements
- Identification and assessment of preventative and mitigation measures
- Identification of the need for and function/requirements of safety barriers
- Effects of uncertainties and assumptions.
What Do You Do With the Results from Risk Studies?
A Risk Study may be a one-time study of limited duration, or it may be ongoing, not having a specific end date. Study results should be released as action items as they are identified. Typical actions such a study might recommend include:
- A review of existing protection system designs by a specialist
- Adding or modifying alarms that warn of deviations
- Adding or modifying relief systems
- Adding or modifying ventilation systems
- Increasing sampling and testing frequency
- Implementation of additional engineering controls
SIS’s experience and knowledge in Risk studies
SIS has a strong and experienced pool of experts within technical safety. We have experience with HAZOP both as part of the design of process plant either as an independent risk analysis or a preliminary study and modification. Our team's competencies in this area as well as its recommandations for future improvements is sustained also by several research articles:
- G. Florea, L. Ocheană, D. Popescu, O. Rohat, “Emerging Technologies – The Base For The Next Goal of Process Control – Risk and Hazard Control”, GAVTASC'11 Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS international conference on Signal processing, computational geometry and artificial vision, and Proceedings of the 11th WSEAS international conference on Systems theory and scientific computation, ISBN: 978-1-61804-027-5, pp. 227-232, 2011.
- G. Florea, R. Dobrescu, "Risk and Hazard Control the new process control paradigm", Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Education and Educational Technologies II (EET '14)
- R. Dobrescu, G. Florea, "Integrating Risk and Hazard and Plantwide Control Solutions for Reconfigurability", Service Orientation in Holonic and Multi-agent Manufacturing, Volume 594 of the series Studies in Computational Intelligence, pp 103-114, 2015.