Management of Process Safety Barriers : A Methodology to Guarantee the Integrity of the Protection Barriers

摘要

The investigation report of the Texas City accident, appointed imperfections in thefunctioning of high level alarms. These alarms could be able to alert the operators aboutoperational deviations in the startup procedure that further caused the death of 13 people.This paper describes a methodology that was created in order to link the process safetyconcepts and the equipments’ integrity management. This methodology was applied inseven industrial units (involving polyethylene, PVC and Chlorine facilities). Besideimproving the reliability of industrial facilities this methodology was able to create a newprocess safety indicator and improves the maintenance team perception about processsafety.