Toxic Release Route Index for Inherently Safer Plant Design

An inherently safer design is one that avoids hazards instead of controlling them, particularly by reducing the amount of hazardous material and the number of hazardous operations in the plant. Methods developed to date have largely been for the evaluating the safety of a proposed design. In the future the emphasis will be more and more on the synthesis of an inherently safer plant. In conceptual design, process routes can be compared and ranked by using
inherent safety indices. In this project, an index will be developed and are used to evaluate the safest route for toxic release. As a case study, the evaluation of methyl
methacrylate process routes is presented. In this case study the results of index methods are compared with expert evaluations of inherent safety level of process routes and the sub-processes included. Also the rankings of process routes given by indices are compared with expert evaluations.