Integrating Safety and Security Management to Protect Chemical Industrial Areas from Domino Effects

This book provides insight into domino effects in industrial chemical sites and process industries. It is about the integration of safety and security resources to prevent and mitigate domino effects in the process industries. It explains how chemical industrial areas, comprised of various hazardous installations, are susceptible to a chain of undesired events, or domino effects, triggered by accidental events or intentional attacks and then presents solutions to prevent them.

Firstly, the book provides a dynamic graph approach to model the domino effects induced by accidental fire or intentional fire, considering the spatial-temporal evolution of fires. Then, a dynamic risk assessment method based on a discrete dynamic event tree is proposed to assess the likelihood of VCEs and the vulnerability of installations, addressing the time dependencies in vapor cloud dispersion and the uncertainty of delayed ignitions. A dynamic methodology based on dynamic graphs and Monte Carlo is provided to assess the vulnerability of individuals and installations exposed to multi-hazards, such as fire, explosion and toxic release during escalation events. Based on these domino effect models, an economic approach is developed to integrate safe and security resources, obtaining the most cost–benefit protection strategy for preventing domino effects. Finally, a resilience-based approach is provided to find out the most cost-resilient way to protect chemical industrial areas, addressing possible domino effects.

This integrated approach will be of interest to researchers, industrial engineers, chemical engineers and safety managers and will help professionals to new solutions in the area of safety and security.

Chao Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at Delft University of Technology. His research is focused on chemical security risk and domino risk. He gained his M.Sc. in Safety Engineering of Oil & Gas Storage and Transportation, BEng in Oil & Gas Storage and Transportation, and Bachelor of Business Management (BBM) in Business Administration from Southwest Petroleum University. He has published around 15 journal articles.

Genserik Reniers was appointed as a full professor at the Delft University of Technology, at the Safety and Security Science Group, in 2013. He is also a professor (in a part-time capacity) both at the University of Antwerp and at the Kuleuven, both in Belgium, lecturing amongst others in engineering risk analysis and risk management. He is also a director of the MOSHE Education at TUDelft. His main research interests concern domino effects, the collaboration surrounding safety and security topics, and socio-economic optimization within the chemical industry. He has extensive experience in leading research projects funded both from public and private sources. He has authored more than 200 papers in impact factor journals and has authored and co-authored, as well as edited, some 40 scientific books.

Ming Yang joined the Safety and Security Science Section at the TU Delft as an Assistant Professor on June 1st, 2020. His research develops qualitative and quantitative approaches for safety and environmental engineering and management problems in the process and marine industries. He has authored and co-authored more than 60 international peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in the field of safety, risk, and environmental engineering. In light of the author Chao Chen. Now he is a postdoctoral researcher rather than a Ph.D. candidate.