Dynamic Simulation Based Safety Consequence Analysis of Chemical Processes

Abstract

Consequence analysis can timely predict the occurrence of potential chemical safety accidents, but is time-consuming and inaccurate when using a manual and qualitative mode. A safety con-sequence analysis method based on dynamic simulation is proposed for chemical processes in this paper. The dynamic simulation system of chemical process is composed of complete thermodynamic model and general unit model to quantitatively describe the dynamic change of chemical process parameters. Combined with fault tree analysis, the accident model is designed prior to forecasting safety consequences by computational fluid dynamics. This method was applied to acetylene production process. A dynamic simulation system was designed to calculate the pressure and concentration of acetylene leakage gas and analyze the parameters affecting the diffusion of acetylene gas. The results show that this method can obtain the quantitative change of acetylene concentration with time at different locations around acetylene generator, which is convenient for accurate and dynamic analysis of process safety consequence.