Risk Assessment and Management in the Process Industries

Dear Colleagues,

The process industry is an industry based on production through physical and/or chemical changes. Typical examples of process industries include the petroleum and chemical industries. The characteristic of the process industry is that production is mostly carried out under the conditions of high temperatures and high pressure, in flammable, explosive, toxic and harmful environments. The existence of safety loopholes in this areas can will easily have catastrophic consequences for personnel, equipment and the environment. To prevent and mitigate losses in the process industries, corresponding risks should be verified comprehensively at first, after which there should be reasonable risk management, i.e., safety or emergency management, meaning risk and its assessment are the optimization objects and the essential procedures of safety and emergency management.

Essentially, physical risk in the process industries under any space–time background originates from the molecular structure features of materials and their states. From the viewpoints of layers of protection and their impact on the industrial processes, the models, methods, and technologies of risk assessment and management can be further classified according to process design, process control, operator intervention, safety instrumented system, active protection, passive protection, plant emergency response, and community emergency response. In other words, risk assessment is critical for the whole life cycle of chemical process. In the design phase, risk assesment is beneficial for inherently safer design of chemical process. It provides a way to compare the safety level of a variety of designs quantitatively or qualitatively. As a result, we can choose inherently safer processes in the early phase. In the production phase, assessment contributes to identifying the critically hazardous parts of the process. Then more attention can be paid on these risk parts in daily management. In addition, risk assessment cannot be overlooked at the disposal stage. For example, the inherent thermal runaway safety index (ITHI) and modified inherent thermal runaway hazard index (m-ITHI) were developed toevaluate the thermal runaway risks of a given chemical process, integrating thermal risk of materials and reaction in the process.

In the past decades, the relevant risk assessment and management models, methods, and technologies have been rapidly developed and extensively applied in the process industries. However, efforts are still needed to explore more and better models, methods, and technologies of risk assessment and management for making safety second nature. For instance,

(1) Pyrophoric iron sulphides (PISs) formed during the extraction, storage and transportation, and refining process of crude oil, natural gas, and other fossil energy media may cause fires and explosions. The risk assessment of spontaneous combustion of PISs is the critical way to better prevent accidents in the industrial field. Unfortunately, up to now, there have been few studies into the severity and possibility of the spontaneous combustion of PISs.

(2) Managing safety means managing risk, and managing risk means paying attention to abnormality. The main problem is one of how to pay attention to abnormality in a timely and effective manner. With an improvement of automation in the process industries, most enterprises have gradually focused on abnormality alarm management based on the DCS, SCADA, and APC. However, there are many problems in the process alarm management, such as improper alarm setting, incorrect alarm response, alarm floods, chattering alarm, and so on. These problems will reduce the safety of production devices, and even lead to malignant accidents. Discussions and studies on the challenges of alarm management (e.g., larm root analysis, alarm threshold setting, alarm priority division, and alarm type identification, etc.) will contribute to achieve effective risk management in the process industries.

(3) With a growing number of new information technologies being applied in the process industries, cybersecurity has quickly become an essential component in maintaining the safe and continued operations of industrial facilities, because cybersecurity attacks on industrial automation and control systems can have physical impacts, which means that the integration of physical safety and cybersecurity should be considered into future risk assessment and management.

(4) Other studies involved in the field of risk assessment and management could focus on the theories about generalization, characterization, and applicability of related models, methods, and technologies through combination with disciplines like system science, complexity science, and network science.

As a result of these considerations, we are launching a new Special Issue of Sustainability entitled Risk Assessment and Management in the Process Industries. Additionally, we hope that the research findings will help us to highlight the latest advances in the field of risk assessment and management in the process industries and outline possible issues that require further exploration to better provide a solid scientific basis and technological support for global and regional sustainable safety.

The research topics include, but are not limited to:

• Literature review related to risk assessment and management;
• Case study/application of risk assessment and management tools in process industries;
• Models, methods, and technologies of risk assessment and management;
• Substance hazards analysis;
• Process hazards evaluation;
• Inherent safety in the process industries;
• Process fault detection, diagnosis, and pre-warning;
• Alarm analysis, prediction, and management in the process industries.

Dr. Zhan Dou
Dr. Lei Ni
Dr. Qianlin Wang
Dr. Xu Diao
Guest Editors

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• process industries
• risk assessment and management
• inherent safety
• process safety