Maintenance-based strategies for environmental risk minimization in the process industries

Industry, environmental agencies and the scientific community have all emph asized the need to include environmental impact considerations next to prof itability objectives in the design phase of modern chemical processes, resp onding to the increasing social concern over environmental degradation in t he past years. Most environmental impact assessment and minimization approa ches, however, are rather qualitative, providing general guidelines, In thi s work, to overcome their limitations and rigorously represent the defining elements of environmental risk, i.e. the mechanism of occurrence of unexpe cted events usually related to equipment failure and the severity of their consequences, detailed process, reliability and maintenance characteristics are incorporated within a process optimization framework. The objective co ncerns the optimization of overall process performance defined as a system effectiveness vector characterized by both the environmental and the profit ability functions of the system. Implementation of the framework on a proce ss example identifies the optimal combination of process design and operati on as well as preventive maintenance strategies that accomplish the conflic ting environmental and profitability targets and quantifies the existing tr ade-offs between them. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.