health, safety, and environmental risk assessment for hydrocracker unit of bandar abbas in refinement of oil company by efmea method

introductionorganizations try to have a safe and healthy work environment without any pollution and damages. healthsafety environment (hse) system is a tool for improving health, safety, and environmental conditions in allindustrial and non-industrial development programs. the system uses all human and financial resources toprovide people with a safe environment without any risk (farshad et al., 2006). hydrocracker unit in refinementof oil company of bandar abbas is an important refinement unit. its activities may cause many environmentaland hazardous problems. the purpose of this study is to assess the situation of health, safety, and environment byenvironmental failure mood and effect analysis (efmea) to minimize the negative effects and provide a riskmanagement program. failure mood effect analysis emerged for assessment of safety in systems is used todetect any possible defects in systems and subsystems based on quantitative analyses. this was modified in someways into efmea as a qualitative method. the later is applied for production development with the purpose tocharacterize and prioritize environmental perspectives (dahlstrom, 2006). in this study the method is used in acombination of two kinds of domestic and international forms to design the hydrocracker form. the perspectivesof the unit activities are identified normal and repairing times.by a literature review on hse this can be revealed that fmea played an effective role in specification andmeasurement of performance indices. the researches indicated that efmea, in addition to finding accidentalaspects, can reduce harmful environmental impacts (jozi et al., 2006). after iso9001 was effectively founded,the efmea and also fmea were introduced as a method to detect possible environmental failures and evaluatethe related risks (jennings, 2008).methodologyin this study we have attempted to evaluate the aspects of the failures in normal, abnormal, and emergencysituations with combination of two forms provided for iran and international levels. efmea method isconducted by a variety of experts (tingstrom, et al., 2006) and the entire unit, thus, is as statistical population forthis study. the method is carried out in the following stages: identification of processes, potential failures asperspectives, consequences of the potential failures as the effects, severity in two magnitudes of environmentaland health risks, situation including three states of normal, abnormal, and emergency, potential causes offailures, occurrence as the repetition of the failure by a cause, detection as precautious measures, ranking ofresources consumption, raw material and energy, ranking of intensity of the effects or the amount of resourceconsumption, ranking of probability of occurrence and detection for resource consumption, determination ofrisk priority number (rpn), recommended precautious measures based on rpn, and ranking of theperspectives in hydrocracker unit. designed form of hydrocracker identifies environmental, safety, and healthperspectives. for the identification the present situation is first recognized in safety and health perspectives.the analysis has been in two different stages: first the rpn was calculated with degree of hazardous usingfrequency distribution of data. second, number of classes was then calculated. for this method theenvironmental perspectives have been entered in efmea form and the rpn calculated based on severity,probability of occurrence, and detection. after the degree ofh azard is obtained, the perspectives are rankedbased on the rpn and those more than the hazard value are considered as critical activities. for the first stage therpns have been sorted descending. for hazard value has been calculated by frequency distribution that requiresnumber and the length of classes. results and discussionsin the unit 24 activities have been investigated in normal times and 6 activities in repairing times. recognitionand ranking of the perspectives have been based on previous experiences of occurred events as well as objectiveobservations. up to 291 perspectives have been identified and evaluated in life cycle of production,consumption, and waste removal. from these about 119 perspectives has rpn more than hazard value. the riskvalue has been determined at 113. thus, the perspectives more than this value are considered as criticalactivities. then, 10 percent of the prioritized rpns are categorized in three groups of risks as very high, high,and moderate. some recommended advices have been suggested for these groups. in the efmea forms thathave been designed in this research for this hydrocracker unit, the perspectives of safety and health risks havebeen identified and evaluated in addition to environmental perspectives. therefore, this form improved thequantitative forms of rezazadeh niavarani (2004) and that of lindahl (2000) and made it better for identificationand evaluation of the research requirements.conclusionsfrom these results it can be concluded that the highest perspective has been the environmental risk in times ofsubstantial repairing with rpn of 343 for consumption. the most quantities of risks are for health and securitywith 68 risks relative to those of environment with 54. therefore, the results and discussions indicate that thishydrocracker unit has a relatively safe, healthy and environmental control system. but, because of theperformance of the system in high pressure and high temperature condition, modification and control conditionsseems necessary for promoting the security measures. the innovation of this study is that it improved theprevious forms for a more competent application.