Development of risk-based inspection software for petrochemical plant

Abstract

Risk-based inspection (RBI) guideline based on API 581 provides a methodology for calculating the risks of equipments in refinery or petrochemical plants. However, there are limitations of such application to the petrochemical plant directly since only a representative material is considered in calculating the risk, especially the consequence of failure, even though the equipment is made up of numerous different materials. The objectives of this paper are to develop a proposed RBI software to resolve the above issue and to evaluate the risk of equipments in petrochemical plants using the software. In this respect, the mole fractions of materials were used to incorporate the characteristics of all materials. The proposed RBI software consists of qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative risk evaluation modules in which toxic materials as well as representative materials were derived automatically for comparison with those in the current guideline. The developed RBI software has been applied to evaluate the risk of equipments in Naphtha Cracking Center (NCC) which is the typical facility of petrochemical plant. Thereby, promising evaluation results were obtained and applicability of the proposed RBI software was proven. Copyright © 2005 by ASME.