A Review of Methodologies for Safety and Hazard Management in Chemical Industries

The growth in chemical industry has also led to the use of more hazardous chemicals, most often at extreme pressures and temperatures. This escalates the risk factors of a particular operation. Due to this, safety, risk assessment, and hazard management have gained utmost importance. Though a complete, full-proof mechanism is not achievable, efforts are made to minimize the hazard level with a comprehensive and exhaustive survey of the available methods and develop a superior safety mechanism. Various measures like risk assessment, hazard analysis, thermal safety analysis, and safety indices are in place and to be incorporated at the design stage to have inherently safer processes. The present paper reviews these safety indices, surveys several modern methods and techniques used in the modern chemical industries for ensuring safety, preventing hazards, and for risk assessment. Various methodologies and techniques are compared, categorized into qualitative, quantitative, and hybrid techniques. The current and future trends of developments in this field have also been reviewed. As a rigorous breakdown analysis of a disaster can help in designing new reliable safety measures, an exemplary case study is presented.