Title : Corrosion risk management and process safety in chemical engineering processes
Abstract:
The aim of this work is to analyze how corrosion risk management influences process safety. Both issues are wide and occupy an important niche in the chemical industry. Corrosion risk management includes identifying, analyzing, assessing, and managing corrosion hazards. Process safety is a discipline that focuses on preventing fires, explosions, and accidental releases at chemical process facilities. Corrosion can cause all these detrimental events. A hazard is a substance, object, or situation with the potential for an accident or damage. Corrosion is one of the biggest hazards because it is related to substances, objects, and situations leading to the interaction between them and the deterioration of both.
Numerous data show that large failures resulting in harmful consequences occur because of corrosion once a week in many chemical enterprises. There is much literature about both topics, corrosion risk, and process safety, separately but there is nearly no research concerning intersections. Usually, specialists in process safety do not know much about the subject of corrosion. Accordingly, corrosionists do not specialize in process safety. In this work, I analyze the role of corrosion risk management in the prevention of corrosion accidents related primarily to the safety of personnel and the environment.
We unite three wide phenomena-concepts: corrosion, corrosion risk management, and process safety. Corrosion management is achieved by the use of anti-corrosion measures, corrosion monitoring, regular inspection, the study of each accident, implementation of meetings, publications of minutes, education, and knowledge transfer. Corrosion risk is achieved by identifying, analyzing, assessment of occurring, and modeling possible corrosion phenomena. Process safety includes the prevention of unintentional releases of dangerous chemicals and energy during processes that can have a serious effect on the plant and environment. This is achieved by the prevention of equipment malfunction, over-pressures, over-temperatures, leaks, spills, and corrosion. All these phenomena are interlinked and interdependent. Process safety programs focus on the design and maintenance of equipment, effective alarms and control points, procedures, and training. Corrosion risk management is an active instrument in all these aspects of process safety and takes part in achieving its main purposes.
The level of corrosion failure and its consequences, defining corrosion risk, may be different: the leak of crude oil, natural gas, water, liquid and gaseous hazardous chemicals, fire, explosion, damages, deterioration of the environment, injuries, and death of people and animals. Due to the biological and psychological properties of human nature, we are unlikely to exclude human mistakes. The human factor plays a vital role in both corrosion risk management and process safety, and as a result in the prevention of corrosion failures and improvement of both. We should pay significant attention to education, dissemination of information, knowledge transfer, collaboration, and communication. Correct corrosion risk management gives rise to the improvement of process safety at stages of design, fabrication, implementation, erection, service and maintenance of equipment and constructions in the chemical industry. Many practical examples will be given during the lecture.
