Applying Functional Safety Engineering Technique to Optimize Defensive Fire Protection Strategy in the Aging Plants

Increasing tendency towards optimization in oil and gas industry and growing demand of shifting fire protection design to defensive strategy requires loss prevention engineers to apply risk based approach in designing fire protection systems. Currently, defensive fire protection strategy is focused on minimizing fire water and subsequently independency of emergency responder. In order to achieve this objective, process safety knowledge and techniques such as consequence analysis, frequency analysis and LOPA shall be used to investigate credibility of potential scenarios and effectiveness of mitigation or protective barriers.

Also, functional safety engineering techniques (such as Failure demand, Mean Time to Failure and test interval) will assist loss prevention engineer to calculate probability failure in demand (PFD) and to minimize the risk in the Event Tree Analysis (ETA).

Atkins Consulting Canada Ltd. has developed a method to link process safety methods (Consequence Modeling, Frequency Analysis and LOPA , etc) and Functional Safety Engineering approach to optimize the defensive design especially for existing plant revamping project.

This presentation demonstrates the risk based defensive fire protection design and a case study with achieved results.