Integration of Fire and Explosion Index in 3D Process Plant Design Software

Off-Site Modular Construction (OSMC) research has been a growing research area over the past two decades because of low productivity in construction. Tools are superior in factories and productivity is much higher compared to a stick built site. This has spawned the development small, factory built, rapidly deployable and flexible process plants to take advantage of the gains in OSMC productivity. Chemical process plant research is studying fast, automated design and configuration. In this paper, a literature review was performed on modular factory manufactured process plants. The literature review found that moving to small scale OSMC plant systems could enable cost and schedule savings and months of design time compared to the previous on-site assembly design. It was also found that while automation has been applied in earlier stages of the plant design process, a layout optimisation methodology has not been applied to small OSMC process plants. The paper then proposes to utilise a mathematical layout optimisation model to help design and construct modular process plants and considers how this may fit into the process plant design process, as well as considering the transport requirements for modules.

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Process Plant Design

An Applied Guide to Process and Plant Design ◽

10.1016/b978-0-12-800242-1.00001-3 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 5-20

Author(s):

Seán Moran

Keyword(s):

Plant Design ◽

Process Plant

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Cost Optimizations of Gas Detector Systems

23rd International Conference on Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering, Volume 2 ◽

10.1115/omae2004-51567 ◽

2004 ◽

Author(s):

Asmund Huser ◽

Luiz Fernando Oliveira ◽

Joar Dalheim

Keyword(s):

Detection System ◽

Optimal Number ◽

Cfd Simulations ◽

Gas Detectors ◽

Process Plant ◽

Gas Detector ◽

Computational Fluid Dynamics Cfd ◽

Fire And Explosion ◽

Explosion Accidents ◽

Risk Reducing

An improved procedure for optimization of flammable gas detector systems in process plant modules is presented in the paper. The main features of the new procedure are that it uses a detailed explosion Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA) model to obtain the risk reducing effects of applying more gas detectors; and it uses detailed transient Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations to assess the most effective locations of the gas detectors. This results in a cost optimized solution which gives the minimum fire and explosion risk, at the lowest cost. A field example is included where it is indicated that with the optimal number of gas detectors, the total costs of fire and explosion accidents are reduced by 18% compared to having no gas detection system at all.

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