Hazard and Operability Study (HAZOP for short), is one of the most popular risk assessment techniques used in a variety of industries such as Oil & Gas, Chemicals, Petrochemicals, Fertilizers, Pharmaceuticals and more. Using this technique to conduct a safety study of a Distillation column in a process plant is referred to as Distillation HAZOP.
This is now a de-facto primary method of risk evaluation and also to mitigate it as the method involves listing out all the possible deviations from intent, analyze the causes that may lead to the deviations and then have corrective measures that will either prevent these mistakes from happening altogether, or would at least reduce their impact.
The HAZOP Study method can be used on a wide variety of processing units in plants including Storage, Distillation, Filtration and so on. Every processing plant would have typical units that are engaged in a particular type of operation such as for example Fluidized Bed Reactors, Catalytic Crackers, Vacuum Distillation and others.
You can learn a lot about this technique by actually participating in HAZOP Study discussions, or by at least being a scribe at such meetings. However there are two factors that will decide if this is possible:
a) you need to be in a job that allows you to do this and
b) you need to be present at enough such discussion meetings that you will learn all about these different processes. (for example if there are only two such meetings and both do not cover any unit related to distillation, you will never get any exposure to the HAZOP for a distillation column)
So how to be an expert in all these unit operations, from a risk assessment point of view, if you do not get an opportunity to participate in enough discussions. That’s easy.
Now the Abhisam HAZOP Enterprise version has a module that actually uses a case study of Distillation. In fact there are other case studies too, involving filtration, storage and reaction. You can easily, instantly get access to this if you or your organization subscribes to this. Click here to do so.