Hazard and Operability (HAZOP) study of wastewater treatment unit producing biohydrogen

Abstract

Risk assessment is an important activity carried out in chemical process plants to ensure health and safety of all concerned. This paper deals with the risk assessment of a particular case study by using reliable technique of HAZOP (Hazard and Operability). The HAZOP study can be used as basic source of information for the design of any commercial plant and to provide positive impacts on the project before and after implementation. The main objective of this work is to apply this tool in a theoretical scenario for which a typical modern industrial wastewater unit producing biohydrogen was selected. For reliable HAZOP study whole process design was done on the basis of Process flow diagram (PFD), Piping and Instrumentation diagram (PID) and standard key words. Then the hazards of whole process were identified and initially some basic safety techniques have been applied to address these issues. Lastly, the results were evaluated indicating that an overall assessment yielded about 57 risks. However for safer system design, about 63 actions were recommended whereas most of them (71%) will need to install new devices.