Top-events Identification
The task of identifying the top-events of a site/industrial location is usually related to:
- A collection of plants. In this case please refer to Plant Safety
- Ancillaries. For example: Pipe-tranches interconnecting different plants and/or storage facilities, HP steam networks, etc. Due to their own nature, the top-events related to these facilities are better investigated developing site-wide safety review than duplicating the analysis for every single plant. The resulting top-events differ markedly from the ones identified in the QRA of a single plant and they led to different top-events (p.e. the loss of the blanketing nitrogen of a tank, studied in the QRA of the tanks farm, is a different scenario than the loss of nitrogen to all the users). The top-events identification of the ancillaries site-wide is complementary to the one carried on focused on a single plant
- Sources of risk coming from “outside the fence” activities because they can act on more than one plant inside the site
- Sources of risk coming from wide-area events (earthquakes, typhoons, etc.) because they impact the whole site
Top-events identification, to be exhaustive, has to be carried on using a collection of techniques each one best tailored for different kind of top-events.
Eidos uses the following techniques:
- HazOp analysis using IEC 61882
- FMEA/FMECA/DFMEA/PFMEA analysis
- Case history analysis using International Databases
- Random rupture using proprietary methods based on API documents
The recording of the HazOp sessions is done using HazOp+ software from Isograph Ltd.
The recording of the FMEA sessions is done using XFMEA software from Reliasoft.
Eidos strongly believes in doing Top-events identification at the customer’s premises to collect the maximum amount of information with the minimum effort on the customer side.
We know: the time of our customer is precious and always scarce!
