Modelling the risk of failure in explosion protection installations: Fid-Bau Portal

Modelling the risk of failure in explosion protection installations

Date, P. / Lade, R.J. / Mitra, G. / Moore, P.E.

This paper addresses the problem of ascribing residual risk for an industrial explosion protection system. Drawing on the domain knowledge of explosion protection professionals, the authors designed a simple but effective algebraic model based on bi-directed graphs to compute the residual risk. This also demonstrates the adaptation of existing analytical tools in operational research to challenging, real life problems. The proposed model captures the residual risk of a protection installation in a meaningful way and allows to analyze quantitatively the cost/benefit trade-offs in different protection system configurations. Even though some of the mathematical tools used will be unfamiliar to the process engineers, the actual methodology is quite simple to implement and does not require knowledge of graph theory. The authors feel that this model is an extremely useful aid for better and more informed design decisions, leading to enhanced overall process safety and greater overall cost-effectiveness in protection system design. The methodology presented here is suited for explosion protection systems in industrial process plants. Modification and adaptation of this model to address specific issues in the computation of risk for other explosion protection applications, such as protection on offshore platforms, is a topic of current research. At present, this methodology has been implemented on trial examples in a prototype software at Kidde Research, UK. A fullscale implementation along with drafting of the required design rules and carrying out the necessary physical experiments is currently in progress.