Search

Management of Change (MOC) is a process for evaluating and controlling modifications to facility design, operation, organisation, or activities. It is one of the most important elements of Process Safety Management (PSM). In chemical process industries (CPI), MOC is required to ensure that safety, health and environment are controlled. In recent years, the number of accidents related to MOC failure is significant and caused by the lacks of MOC management, organisation safety culture, design failure, incompetency, human factor and etc. From the accident statistics published by Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB-US), European Major Accident Reporting System (EMARS-European), Failure Knowledge Database (FKD-Japan) and Accident Reporting Information Analysis (ARIA-France), MOC contributes significantly to the occurrence of accidents and its percentage contribution to accident rate is not decreasing over the past 20 years. In this paper, the contribution of MOC failure to accidents and their main failure factor are identified from the study of over thousands of accident cases and analysed with data mining method. Study revealed the major factor of MOC failure are the lack of organisation commitment, lack of experience, limitation of resources, inadequate of HAZOP study, human factor, safety culture and etc. Good practice of MOC has to be inculcated in CPI through learning from past accident and continuous improvement of MOC system.

Process safety management (PSM) covers the aspect of process hazard identification, understanding the level of risk and hazard reduction to prevent process-related failures. The need for understanding on how the process safety elements fail is essential in improving the quality of the accidents prevention effort. In this paper, the contributions of PSM element to chemical process accident are studied using major process failures in the chemical process industry (CPI). Around 770 major accident cases were collected and analysed from several accident data base such as Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB-US), European Major Accident Reporting System (EMARS), Failure Knowledge Database (FKD-Japan) and Accident Reporting Information Analysis (ARIA). The PSM element failures were ranked in accordance to their frequency and importance in accident prevention. Based on the result, majority of the element failure is classified as design and technical reasons (53 % of total process failures) and the rest is related to management related causes (47 %). The most common accident contributors were identified to be the process hazards analysis (19 % of total process failures), operating procedures (17 %), employee participation (12 %), training (11 %), management of change (9 %), mechanical integrity (9 %), and permit to work (9 %). In depth, analysis on individual PSM elements were made for better understanding on their readiness and its implementation issues in the CPI. Appropriate suggestion for continuous improvement of PSM implementation will also be suggested.

In Malaysia, the growth of economic is connected to the fossil energy resources which are continued to effect by the growing of energy demand. Hydrogen is an alternative for energy and electricity generation, especially for transportation application and can significantly reduce the carbon monoxide (CO) emission and air pollution. The research on renewable energy especially from biomass such as oil palm empty fruit bunch (OPEFB) can contributes to reduce the concern over the energy insecurity and will help Malaysia in creating a sustainable energy supply. Research on the hydrogen production process by using OPEFB was reported in several papers. However, the review criteria and the best technology for hydrogen production process application are still missing. This paper attempts to develop hydrogen technology database from various types of hydrogen production process of OPEFB. It can be used to determine the most feasible and promising route to be applied. This study is also significant in helping the industry to see the differences of various design alternatives and make process design decisions on them.

The world is gradually moving toward a severe energy crisis due to depletion of fossil fuels. Biodiesel is one of the technically and economically feasible options to solve the aforesaid problem. However, the overall costs of biodiesel production associated with the increasing market price of its feedstock clearly influence the profitability of the process. Therefore, biodiesel production has been directed toward waste materials as feedstock such as waste cooking oil (WCO). On the other hands, WCO is dealing with high free fatty acids (FFA) contents which gives a significant effect to the transesterification reaction, resulting in a lower biodiesel production. Therefore, a viable catalyst is needed for wide industrial usage in biodiesel synthesis from WCO. CaO is one of the promising heterogeneous catalyst for the transesterification reaction. However, CaO is deals with some limitations that need to overcome. This research paper deals with the synthesis of heterogeneous calcium titanate (CT) catalyst from calcium oxide (CaO) and titanium precursor by a sol-gel method for pilot evaluation in biodiesel production. CT catalyst was produced under different calcination temperature (200 °C, 400 °C, 600°C, 800 °C). The synthesized catalysts were evaluated for performance in transesterification reaction of methanol with WCO. BET surface area, XRD, and SEM were measured to correlate the activity with the structural features of the catalysts. The results exhibited that the calcination temperature of 400 °C is more preferable in terms of technical and economic feasibility. A biodiesel yield of 80.0 % was observed with a methanol to oil molar ratio of 15:1 and 1 wt. % of CT catalyst loading amount in 1 h at 65 °C which is comparative with commercial CaO catalyst calcined at 400 °C (60.0 % of biodiesel yield) at the same reaction conditions.

Permit to Work (PTW) is the Technical Measurement Document required to control work such as maintenance, inspection, modification and non-routine high risk activities to prevent a major accident. It is one of the elements of the Process Safety Management (PSM). The current issue of the chemical process industry (CPI) is that the accident rate has not decreased even though PSM has been widely implemented in the developed country. Statistics on the accident cases published by Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (US), European Major Accident Reporting System and Failure Knowledge Database (Japan) has revealed that PTW has significance contribution to the occurrence of accidents and is worthwhile to be studied in details. Failure in complying with PTW system has caused major accidents cases, such as Motiva Enterprise LLC (2001), Phillips Pasadena (1989) and Piper Alpha Platform (1988). Another reason for studying PTW, being that the trend of its percentage of contribution to process accident rate is not decreasing over the past two decades even though there are shared information and feedback available. In the chemical process industry, there are various types of PTW namely Hot Work, Confined Space Entry, Line breaking & vessel opening and others. Each has its own function and the percentage contribution of each PTW type is determined using data mining approach. This study is focusing on the identification of main factors of PTW- related accidents which are classified under organisation, human factors, communication, competency, procedure, supervision, tools and equipment and etc. The percentage contribution of each main factor is determined and the results are presented for sharing and learning purposes.

Diverse gypsum facies in terms of crystal size and morphology are deposited in a shallow, non-marine, sulfateenriched, semi-closed, perennial evaporite basin. These gypsum facies were deposited in intimate association with cyanobacterial mats. Facies analyses and geochemistry revealed two distinct primary facies, based on gypsum fabric; massive selenite, and laminated gypsum varieties. The massive selenite facies is composed of clusters of single and twinned crystals along (100), with upward pointing re-entrant angle. The laminated gypsum varies from rhythmically laminated grass-like selenite to gypsum microbialite (stromatolite). The change from massive selenite to laminated gypsum facies implies fluctuation in lateral and vertical salinity profiles, seasonal brine concentrations and wind action. Post-depositional changes in the form of dissolution, slight to moderate crystal deformation and recrystallization to anhydrite are evaluated. We develop a qualitative model for the depositional basin and facies distribution in order to simulate ancient analogues.