Is Safety and Reliability Two Faces of the Same Coin for Ammonia Plant ESD System?

Keywords: Emergency shutdown system, Solenoid valves, Safety, Reliability, Failure incident, Test bench, Lock-up valve, Component failure analysis

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Abstract:

Three years ago, SAFCO experienced an incident in the Ammonia Plant, in which the air coil feeding the Secondary Reformer burst, which caused damage. The reason for this incident was attributed to the air feeding control valve of the secondary air ingression reformer, which did not close as per emergency shutdown logic. As a consequence a study was initiated to review all emergency shutdown valves in the NH3 plant, as well as to better identify ways of quantifying reliability and improving Safety.

This paper will focus its attention on emergency shutdown system design aspects for a typical Ammonia plan. Furthermore the paper reviews spurious lock-up valve failures of FV110, and discusses its consequences. The paper also deals with what international standards state about ESD reliability and assess standard adequacy to quantify field ESD components. It will introduce alternate methods to quantify reliability of ESD components, and discuss how to establish component failure analysis to investigate hardware malfunction. © 2009 Inside Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

Volume: 2009   Issue: 2
EUR 7.45
(Pages: 12, Words: 4964)

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