Abstract
API 581 guideline provides a methodology for calculating the risks of equipments in refinery or petrochemical plant. However, especially in part of the consequence of failure, there is a major limitation of its application to the petrochemical plant directly since only a representative material is considered in calculating the risk while the equipment is composed of numerous materials. The objectives of this paper are to propose an enhanced risk-based inspection (RBI) technique to resolve shortcomings inclusive of the above issue and to assess the risks of typical petrochemical equipments. In this respect, a program incorporating material database was developed to fully incorporate the characteristics of different materials. The proposed RBI program consists of qualitative, semi-quantitative and quantitative risk evaluation modules in which toxic materials as well as representative materials were selected automatically for comparison to those in the current guideline. It has been applied to assess the risks of equipments in ethylene facilities of petrochemical plants. Thereby, more realistic evaluation results were obtained and applicability of the proposed RBI program was proven.
