An international pharmaceutical
company operates a pilot plant for new product development.
Due to the changing nature of the pilot plant needs, most of
the process equipment is portable and is connected to other
equipment and vent headers using flexible hoses. If a relief
device were to relieve, there was a concern that the equipment
might move or tip over and cause personnel injury and
equipment damage.
A typical reactor was used as the
basis for the study. A series of dynamic loads were calculated
based on a range of relieving pressures using SuperChems
Expert software. Next a finite element model of the reactor
and relief system was developed. A dynamic finite element
analysis was conducted for a number of relief device
configurations. The results showed that a 1000lbf lateral load
applied at the relief device for 1 second was sufficient to
cause the reactor to roll and tip over.
Our analysis confirmed that the
current configuration of relief devices on reactors was
adequate to prevent movement during a relief event. The client
is now aware of the potential for movement and can use this
information to inspect relief system configurations on all
pilot plant equipment and to design future relief systems to
prevent movement during relief events.
An international oil company was
preparing to startup a state of the art acid gas injection
facility and needed to benchmark against current industry
practices for handling large quantities of toxic gas at high
pressure.
Our staff teamed with another process
safety consulting organization to research current industry
practices that were publicly available as well as information
available at companies where we had good industry contacts. We
were able to provide considerable information on the handling
of other toxic materials including hydrogen fluoride,
phosgene, chlorine, hydrogen sulfide and others. These
industry practices were then compared to those used on the
project and several were incorporated into the design and
operation of the new facility. The Benefits
Our team was able to provide a
considerable amount of relevant information on an extremely
fast track. The client was able to compare their proposed
practices to those for handling other toxic materials and
incorporate some additional features without a significant
impact on their project schedule and cost.
An international pharmaceutical
company has an aggressive schedule for new product development
and needs technical support with respect to reactivity testing
and process safety in their pilot plant.
We provided an overall process for
conducting reactivity testing in the form of a six
best-practices type, simple, practical and easy to use
documents with examples. Included in these documents were a
number of practical tools consisting of public-domain software
and proven ioMosaic Corporation spreadsheets and computational
tools. Finally for each best practice, we provided training to
assist in the implementation of each best practice and
associated tools.
The client has purchased
reactivity-testing equipment and will be conducting their own
testing. The reactivity screening tools provided are helping
to identify significant reactivity hazards that need to be
evaluated in process hazard analyses.
An international consumer products
manufacturer suffered a significant business interruption due
to failure of a critical support facility. This incident
raised the question of whether there were other critical
support facilities that could cause a similar interruption in
production or a significant safety or environmental impact.
Based on a list of support facilities
identified by the client, we held a series of brainstorming
sessions following a failure mode and effects analysis
approach. For each support service, failure modes were
identified along with potential causes. The impacts of these
failures on safety, environment and/or production were then
assessed based on four levels of severity. Existing safeguards
were identified. Recommendations to mitigate these failures or
their consequences were then proposed. We also provided
guidance on how to assess the frequency of each scenario in
order to assess risk as a means to prioritize the
recommendations.
Over 100 scenarios were developed,
some of which could cause a major safety, environmental or
business interruption impact. Over 50 recommendations were
made. In addition, the client will verify that all listed
safeguards are in place and functioning effectively.
An international personal products
manufacturer needed to complete process hazard analyses of
their alcohol processes to meet regulatory and company
requirements. The process hazard analyses could not be
completed until all necessary process safety information was
compiled.
We traced out each piece of equipment
and interconnecting piping and updated existing piping and
instrument drawings and provided them in electronic CAD
format. In the meanwhile the client collected all other
process safety information. We updated existing PHAs and
conducted new PHAs for the appropriate section of the process.
For equipment that manufactured multiple products, we defined
the worst-case products from a potential safety impact in
terms of the quantity of alcohol added and the alcohol
concentration and temperature in the product after alcohol
addition. These products were then used as the proxy for the
full range of products manufactured in that
equipment.
The required process hazard analyses
were completed in a timely manner and identified ways to
reduce potential for fires and explosions.
Process
Safety Management Quality Audits The Challenge
Companies have implemented their
process safety management programs to comply with OSHA and EPA
requirements, but they continue to have accidents. Process
safety management programs can meet the letter of the law, but
may not be effective in preventing accidents. Traditional
audit programs look at documentation and procedures, but do
little to evaluate the program quality or
effectiveness.
Our
Approach
ioMosaic Corporation developed a
quality process safety management audit protocol to dig below
the surface of process safety programs and evaluate their
quality. A particular focus of quality PSM audits is the
process hazard analysis and management of change elements. For
PHAs, we evaluated the availability of process safety
information, implementation of the selected methodology and
criteria for making recommendations (typically using risk
ranking).
The
Benefits
Significant deficiencies in these
areas were identified. Although prior audits had not
identified any program deficiencies related to regulatory PSM
requirements, a closer look at the quality of the procedures
and training revealed significant issues that compromised the
effectiveness of PHA and MOC programs. Recommendations were
made to address these issues and improve the overall quality
of these programs.
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Review of Preliminary Hazard Analyses for
Chemical Demilitarization Options
The Challenge
Chemical weapons produced by the US
military must be demilitarized by international treaty. Since
some of these weapons are old, they must be demilitarized at
the sites where they are currently stored to avoid potential
releases during transportation. Existing technology for
chemical weapon demilitarization is using incineration.
However, local community concerns regarding vapor emissions
required the search for alternate technologies to demilitarize
chemical weapons. Three new technologies were selected for
evaluation. Each new technology has its own unique safety
concerns and each had to demonstrate that their technology was
“as safe as incineration”.
Our
Approach
Since each technology provider was
required to conduct a preliminary hazard analysis (PHA) and
make recommendations to reduce risk to tolerable levels, we
focused our review of their PHAs on the inherent safety of
each technology. The major areas considered in the review
included: potential for chemical agent release, potential for
fire or explosion, potential for exposure to process
chemicals, extent of manual operation, equipment maintenance
requirements and technical risk. For each major process area,
the inherent safety of each new technology was compared to
incineration.
The
Benefits
Our inherent safety review revealed
that two of the three proposed technologies had an equivalent
level of inherent safety compared to incineration, while the
third would require significant modification to achieve an
equivalent level of inherent safety. This information along
with evaluations of design, cost and schedule were used to
select the best technology for development.
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Hydrogen Fueling Safety
Assessment
The
Challenge
The California Energy Commission has
been directed to assist in the development of clean alternate
transportation fuels. As part of this effort they are
supporting the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles
operating on hydrogen fuel. In order to be used extensively in
the transportation sector, the safety of hydrogen production,
storage and supply needs to be addressed. This will require
evaluation of different alternate designs for supply of
hydrogen at fueling stations.
Our Approach
Four alternate technologies for
hydrogen supply were selected including: delivery of hydrogen
gas by tube trailer, delivery of liquid hydrogen by truck,
reforming of natural gas and electrolysis. The plan is conduct
a failure modes and effects analysis of these four
technologies based on existing designs and for comparison to
also review two compressed natural gas fueling
designs.
The Benefits
The results will be used to identify
potential failures in hydrogen and compressed natural gas
fueling stations, assess their potential consequences and
evaluate whether existing safeguards are adequate.
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Independent Review of Risk Management
Program for Proposed Plant Expansion
The Challenge
A world-class chemical company was
involved in a project to triple the capacity of its fumigant
plant to meet demand due to the phase-out of competing ozone
depleting fumigants. The existing plant is regulated by
several state and local agencies and the expansion project
required permit approval in accordance with applicable laws
and regulations. Certain agencies wanted an independent review
of the company’s risk assessment procedures and safeguarding
systems for protecting the public from operational
hazards.
Our Approach
Our staff teamed with an environmental
consulting organization to review and critique the company’s
risk management plan for the expanded facility. The ioMosaic
team was comprised of several process safety engineers who
routinely apply current state-of the-science risk management
tools. We utilized our knowledge and experience with hazard
evaluation and risk management to quickly review the practices
employed by the chemical company, and assess the quality of
the results.
The
Benefits
Our team was able to assimilate a
considerable amount of project risk management information on
an extremely fast track and prepare a critique of the quality
and thoroughness of the risk assessment effort. Our assessment
of the risk management activities applied to the project was
incorporated into a report to the local agencies.
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Corporate Guidance on Risk
Management
The
Challenge
The chemical company of a large
integrated energy company was developing a corporate standard
for layer of protection analysis (LOPA), which incorporated a
risk ranking matrix. The company was interested in obtaining
an independent review of the design of the risk matrix, and in
benchmarking the underlying risk tolerability criteria with
generally accepted industry norms.
Our Approach
Our senior risk management specialists
met with their LOPA procedure development team and provided
guidance on how to define practical frequency and consequence
severity categories associated with the risk matrix. In
addition, we provided plots of release quantity versus down
wind distance for flammable and toxic chemicals to assist
practitioners in identifying events with catastrophic
consequences. Finally, we were able to provide similar company
(anonymous) tolerability benchmarks for comparison with the
client’s internal tolerability criteria.
The Benefits
Utilizing the benchmarking
information, the client was able to satisfy upper management
that the corporate risk management standard was consistent
with those of other companies in their peer group and not
overly conservative. Our recommendations regarding the risk
matrix improved its ease of use by plant personnel who were
not experts in risk assessment, and allowed it to be used for
conducting process hazard analyses in addition to LOPA.
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Risk Assessments of Refinery
Units
The
Challenge:
A large Canadian Refinery is
performing risk assessments to identify personnel,
environmental and operational hazards. This work is being done
on a planned schedule with a different unit being reviewed
annually. The challenge was to use Process Hazard Analysis
(PHA) methodologies that provide an effective analysis
appropriate to the unit to be studied and the potential
hazards.
Our
Approach:
For the risk assessment of the
refinery’s cooling water systems and acid gas/sulfur recovery
systems a top down fault tree analysis was used. The PHA of
the HF Alkylation unit was done to meet the requirements of
API RP-751. This required the use of the HAZOP methodology
followed by consequence analysis of the identified high-risk
release scenarios using SuperChems™. For other refinery units
such as the Crude Tower, Hydrocracker and BTX unit a
combination of the HAZOP and What-if/Checklist methodology was
utilized.
The
Benefits
For the refinery ioMosaic was able to
tailor the PHA approach to the unit to be reviewed and meet
the refinery’s risk assessment goals at minimum cost to the
refinery. The risk assessments reports will allow the refinery
to easily revalidate the risk assessments in the future.
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Adequacy of Hydrocracker Emergency
Relief System
The
Challenge:
A refinery wanted to ensure that
pressure relief capacity was adequate for the loss of liquid
seal scenario in a high-pressure separator (2,000 psig). Also
they were concerned about the pressure waves that would occur
in the high-pressure separator’s outlet lines on rapid closing
of the isolation valves.
Our
Approach:
Using ioMosaic’s SuperChems Expert™
software we were able to model the system between the
high-pressure separator and the down stream vessel. The system
consisted of three parallel flow paths. In one path there was
a power recovery turbine that was modeled. The other two flow
paths contained control valves. The fluid flowing in the
piping was a mixture containing twelve compounds, which were
also included in the modeling.
The Benefits:
Using the SuperChems™ simulations we
were able to show that the relief valves and piping were
adequate for the flow of gas that would be encountered on loss
of liquid seal and that the downstream vessel would not be
subject to a pressure greater than its MAWP. Lastly an optimum
valve closing time was determined that would not result in
pressure waves that could cause failure of the upstream
piping.
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Fire Exposure and Relief Protection
for Vessels Containing Reactive
Chemicals
The
Challenge:
The client was storing reactive
materials in vessels that could be subject to fire exposure.
They wanted to be sure that the relief protection on the
vessels was correctly sized or if not, what changes were
necessary for an effective relief system.
Our Approach:
Using the SuperChems Expert™ software
package and reaction kinetic data supplied by the client,
ioMosaic performed dynamic simulations of the vessels and the
relief valves containing the reactive materials. From the
simulations, plots of the internal pressures and temperatures
of the vessels were calculated. For some vessels, due to
exposure to the heat input from the fire, the internal
temperature could get high enough to cause a runaway reaction.
For these vessels additional dynamic simulations were
conducted to determine the effects of adding fireproof
insulation or increasing the relief valve size.
The Benefits:
From the dynamic simulations made,
ioMosaic was able to advise the client on the most economical
approach to obtain an effective emergency relief system. Full
documentation of the work was provided for their PSM
files.
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Litigation Support
Owner/Contractor
Relationships
The
Challenge:
As the supplier of contract labor the
client was being held responsible for the operation and safety
of a chemical plant in which there was an explosion and
several fatalities.
Our
Approach:
Utilizing our partners’ detailed
knowledge of the process chemistry and 25 years of chemical
plant operation and management experience we were able to
establish through deposition testimony, documents and the
labor contact, that actual operational control of the plant
was exercised by the owner. Having operational control meant
that the owner made all decisions regarding plant operation,
maintenance and safety.
The
Benefits:
It is expected that if the case were
settled out of court a settlement favorable to our client, the
contractor, would result. If it were to go to trial our
client’s liabilities would be greatly reduced.
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Toxic Gas Release During Delivery of
Chemical
The
Challenge:
When a tank car failed at a customer’s
plant, a release of toxic gas occurred. Our client, the
supplier of the chemical was the subject of a class action
lawsuit.
Our
Approach:
Utilizing a partner’s expertise in the
handling of this toxic material, corrosion expertise, and
laboratory experiments which were video taped for use in
court, we were able to show that the tank car failure and
resulting release was due to the customer’s actions. Then
using dispersion modeling we were also able to show that many
of the claims of plaintiffs in the class were
spurious.
The
Benefits:
Just prior to the start of the trial
our client, the chemical supplier, was able to reach an
acceptable settlement with the plaintiffs.
BACK TO TOP
Chemical Delivered into Wrong
Tank
The
Challenge:
A supplier was being sued because his
product when delivered went into the wrong storage tank. This
lead to a chemical reaction and release of chlorine to which
the plaintiffs claimed they were exposed.
Our Approach:
Utilizing a partner’s experience with
the delivery of chemicals by tank truck to plants and the
practices in place, we could testify that the driver had
followed correct practices. From a review of training records,
deposition testimony and a visit to the site, we were able to
establish that plant personnel were responsible for the
product being placed in the wrong tank and the resulting
chlorine release.
The
Benefits:
A settlement for a minimum amount was
reached with the plaintiffs, to avoid a trial. Our client was
pleased with the results.
BACK TO TOP
Faulty Workmanship in Fabricating a
Heat Exchanger
The
Challenge:
A heat exchanger manufacturer was
being sued on a claim of poor workmanship after the heat
exchanger had been in service in a plant for ten
years.
Our Approach:
A history of the heat exchanger from
manufacturing to service in the plant was established. From
the supplier’s records it was established that the heat
exchanger had been built to code and had passed the
engineering contractor’s inspection. A review of plant records
showed that the failure was due to improper installation and
abuse by the plant during operation and
maintenance.
The
Benefits:
With the information developed by
ioMosaic staff our client’s attorney was able to have the suit
dropped by the
plaintiff.
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