A New Trend in Designing Plant Layouts for the Process Industry

Process safety might be considered as the most important area to improve several aspects in the process industry design. Ways of dealing with hazards include means to either control them or totally remove them. Both control and removal ways can be applied during the design stage to produce inherently safer designs. There exist several practical examples where issues related to inherently safer designs have been explored (Kletz, 1984). Seven basic principles of inherently safer design have been identified from many application cases: intensification, substitution, attenuation, simplicity, operability, fail-safe design and second chance design, see for instance (Mannan, 2005). Indeed, the plant layout has been identified as a prominent feature for the second chance design, which means that it represents a second line of defence to guard against initial hazards or failures since the process has been already designed at this stage (Mannan, 2005).