Toxic Release Stream Index for Inherently Safer Plant Design

An inherently safer design plant 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. Since years before, plenty of researchers have developed methodologies and studies to enhance the implementation of inherent safety concept in the industry. Inherent safe is best when applied towards the preliminary stage of the design rather than towards the end, due to its ability to reduce the cost of the overall plant design. In conceptual design, process routes and streams can be compared and ranked by using inherent safety indices. Many indices has been developed but unable to cover all parameters of the inherent safety. This paper will focus on producing an index and implemented to evaluate the streams that are highly susceptible to loss of containment in the form of toxic release. A case study on Acrylic Acid production plant will then be used to evaluate the usage of the index developed by using the Toxic Release Stream Index (TRSI). The results presented towards the end of this work proves that the index produced may be able to point out the inherently unsafe streams and modify the design up to be acceptable level during the preliminary stage design stage.