A New approach to Optimizing the Facility Siting and Layout for Fire and Explosion Scenarios

摘要

Effective facility siting and layout should address plant operation and maintenance as well as safety performance. In order to obtain a safer plant layout, some possible consequence scenarios resulting from accidental chemical releases and their likelihood are often addressed at the initial stage of layout development. In this work, a new approach to optimizing facility siting and layout for flammable gas release scenarios and their resulting consequences such as fire and explosion are presented. This new approach focuses on integrating quantitative risk analysis in the optimization formulation to obtain the optimal allocation of new facilities based on particular risk criteria derived from accident scenarios. Three different approaches to configure the optimal location of new facilities are presented: fixed distance (recommended separation distance) approach, optimized layout by considering the structural damage due to blast overpressures, and finally, the integration of first two approaches with weighting factors to account for building occupancy and domino effect. The objective function was to minimize the total cost of land, interconnection, and financial risk. The overall problem was modeled as a disjunctive program to achieve a layout of rectangular-shaped facilities and the convex hull approach was used to reformulate the problem as a Mixed Integer Non-Linear Program (MINLP) to identify potential layouts. Furthermore, the proposed methodology was evaluated using Flame Acceleration Simulator (FLACS) to consider the congestion and confinement effects in the plant in order to provide substantial guidance for deciding the final layout.