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This article focuses on the risks associated with Hazardous Materials Transportation (HazMaT) events in the French chemical industry between 1981 and 2022. The study aims to analyze and assess the causes and consequences of past events using the ARIA database, which lists over 54,000 events that have taken place in France and abroad. The severity of events is classified into five categories, from near misses to catastrophic events. The study highlights the importance of risk analysis/assessment and lessons learned from past events in managing natural and technological risks.

Thermal runaway is a serious problem in the chemical industry from a safety point of view. Among the measures that must be taken into consideration to avoid it, is the set of the optimal operating conditions. However, reactors are never safe from failure events despite the choice of optimal operating conditions. In the present work, the fault detection was studied and discussed by using two different thermal runaway criteria. The performances of detection when a faulty situation occurred, were compared using the chosen thermal runaway criteria. These faulty operations are the results of faults on the cooling system. The chosen reaction for this study is the perhydrolysis of formic acid to peroxyformic acid by hydrogen peroxide. The reaction was studied in a batch reactor under isoperibolic normal mode. From the results obtained, the studied criteria can provide good prediction of unsafe operation of reactors when a fault on the operating parameters occurred. The performance of detection of thermal runaway situation differs between the criteria. However, the criteria can be used as helpful tools for online reactor operations.

The chemical industry’s activities are often controversial due to the high risks that they represent. Over the past decades, serious industrial events affecting lives, facilities and environment have heightened society's awareness of the negative effects of technology. Among the most hateful events in the chemical industries are the phenomena of thermal runaway that often result in operator errors. Predicting and controlling them is essential to the processes design and safe operation. The objective of this work is to develop a method for early detection of malfunctions in a chemical reactor based on a reference model, before resulting in a critical event. For this, the reaction of perhydrolysis of formic acid to peroxyformic acid by hydrogen peroxide is used as a test case to simulate the reaction in abnormal operating mode. This exothermic reaction is composed of several secondary decomposition steps. The kinetic model of the reaction was determined in order to simulate the reaction in an abnormal mode with defects related to operator error. The detection method has been validated by simulation data. A performance analysis of the proposed detection method was carried out showing the robustness and the efficiency of this method, in presence of various errors due to the operator. The proposed method can contribute to the safety of chemical reactors in the chemical industry.