Classification of the Criticality of Safety Barriers Is Critical for Maintenance Success in PSM

Issues associated with the safety of industrial processes have moved all the organizations around the world. The history of accidents and the accident at BP's Texas City, was a milestone in recent years on issues related to actual losses and their causes and consequences, either through knowledge of potential risk scenarios for accidents, existing in plant process, they identified through the risk analysis process.

Based on data of accidents and incidents throughout the world, issues related to mechanical integrity of facilities is very important when looking at the prevention and mitigation of fires, explosions and leaks of hazardous products that have the potential to cause great losses to people, facilities and environment.

In this text we would like to highlight the importance of considering the concept of barriers of protection, identification, definition of its role in the scenario of risk, defining and assessing the relationship between them in seeking the prevention of occurrence of the scenario and if it occurs in the search for mitigation of, the definition of reliability required for the same and thus the definition of management needed to preserve the integrity of them, applying all the concepts and practices of maintenance.

The experience we have, applying the dynamic model of process safety, developed at the Braskem, identified by cross audits of Process Safety(Systemic and Scenarios Barriers avaluations), that there is no practical use of process risk analysis of the scenarios to better define the criticality of the equipment or instrument. This important definition of how Critical this equipment or component is to the process scenario will define how the equipment / instrument / system will be maintained in order to protect its integrity, as the level of reliability required in the light of its importance to the scenario of risk / process. This work done in a systematic way of ensuring an effective business issues of cost and risk management process, ensuring that resources are allocated properly aligned with the required levels of availability of each component / system safety.

Focus is the search for the optimization of the binomial MAINTENANCE COSTS AND RISK MANAGEMENT PROCESS