MULTIVARIATE HAZARD IDENTIFICATION AND RANKING SYSTEM

Risk analysis in chemical process industries is an elaborate exercise involving several steps from preliminary hazard identification to deve lopment of credible accident scenarios, to preparation of strategies f or prevention or control of damage. All this requires substantial inpu ts of time and money. In order to get an approximate yet workable asse ssment of risk at much lesser costs, indices have been developed which link typical findings of elaborate risk analysis to scales of risk. T he scales, in turn, provide workable measures of hazards/risks/safety. In the past, indices have been reported for swift risk! assessment-th e noteworthy among them include Dow fire and explosion index Mond fire , explosion and toxicity index IFAL index, and mortality index. A few rapid ranking techniques have also been proposed. This paper presents a new system of methodologies for Hazard Identification and Ranking (H IRA). The system consists of two indices: one for fire and explosion h azards and another for the hazard due to likely release of toxic chemi cal. The magnitudes of these indices indicate the severity of the like ly accident; in terms of the size of the impacted area. HIRA has been applied to a typical chemical process industry-a sulfolane plant-and i ts performance has been compared with that of the Dow's and the Mend's indices. The study reveals that HIRA is more sensitive and accurate t han the other indices.