It is considered by many that for industry to prosper into the 1990s it must adopt the principles of total quality control. These principles offer the opportunity to tap previously unused brainpower within an organisation, and to achieve what our potential overseas customers expect of us, that is, a guaranteed 100 per cent good product. This paper presents one company's ideas and methods of implementation. Tqc is very much a people thing, and requires employees at all levels to become familiar with, and practise basic charting and problem solving techniques. Economics do not allow us to load up our organisations with service departments. Quality must be controlled by the people at the workface (a).

Total quality control

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01988966/document

The future of risk assessment

Natural hazards and disasters can cause major accidents in chemical and process installations. These so-called Natech accidents can result in hazardous-materials releases due to damage to process and storage units, or pipes. In order to understand the dynamics of Natech events, accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning recorded in industrial accident databases were analysed. This allowed the identification of the most vulnerable equipment types, their modes of failure due to natural-event impact and the final accident scenarios. Moreover, lessons learned for future accident prevention and mitigation were derived. The analysis showed that pipes and storage tanks are the most vulnerable equipment for earthquakes, floods and lightning, calling for more research of equipment behaviour under natural-event loading. The damage modes and states are strongly dependent on the characteristics of the impacting natural event. Toxic dispersion, fires and explosions were observed as a consequence of all three types of analysed natural events. In the case of floods, two additional scenarios were identified. These are water contamination and the formation of toxic and/or flammable vapours upon reaction of the released chemicals with the floodwaters. The overall number of recorded Natech accidents was found to range from 2 to 5% of all reported accidents in the analysed databases.

Industrial accidents triggered by earthquakes, floods and lightning: lessons learned from a database analysis

Crude oil tank fire and explosion (COTFE) is the most frequent type of accident in petroleum refineries, oil terminals or storage which often results in human fatality, environment pollution and economic loss. In this paper, with fault tree qualitative analysis technique, various potential causes of the COTFE are identified and a COTFE fault tree is constructed. Conventional fault tree quantitative analysis calculates the occurrence probability of the COTFE using exact probability data of the basic events. However, it is often very difficult to obtain corresponding precise data and information in advance due to insufficient data, changing environment or new components. Fuzzy set theory has been proven to be effective on such uncertain problems. Hence, this article investigates a hybrid approach of fuzzy set theory and fault tree analysis to quantify the COTFE fault tree in fuzzy environment and evaluate the COTFE occurrence probability. Further, importance analysis for the COTFE fault tree, including the Fussell–Vesely importance measure of basic events and the cut sets importance measure, is performed to help identifying the weak links of the crude oil tank system that will provide the most cost-effective mitigation. Also, a case study and analysis is provided to testify the proposed method.

Fuzzy fault tree analysis for fire and explosion of crude oil tanks

Two bacterial species (isolates N and O) were isolated from a paddy soil microcosm that had been artificially contaminated with diesel oil to which extrinsic Pseudomonasaeruginosa strain WatG, had been added exogenously. One bacterial species (isolate J) was isolated from a similar soil microcosm that had been biostimulated with Luria–Bertani (LB) medium. Isolates N and O, which were tentatively identified as Stenotrophomonas sp. and Ochromonas sp., respectively, by sequencing of their 16 S rRNA genes had no ability to degrade diesel oil on their own in any liquid medium. When each strain was cocultivated with P. aeruginosa strain WatG in liquid mineral salts medium (MSM) containing 1% diesel oil, isolate N enhanced the degradation of diesel oil by P. aeruginosa strain WatG, but isolate O inhibited it. In contrast, isolate J, which was tentatively identified as a Rhodococcus sp., degraded diesel oil contained not only in liquid LB and MSM, but also in paddy soil microcosms supplemented with LB medium. The bioaugmentation capacity of isolate J in soil microcosms contaminated with diesel oil was much higher than that of P. aeruginosa strain WatG. The possibility of using isolate J for autochthonous bioaugmentation is discussed.

https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/30188/1/WJMB23-12.pdf

Isolation and characterization of bacteria from soil contaminated with diesel oil and the possible use of these in autochthonous bioaugmentation

This paper reviews 242 accidents of storage tanks that occurred in industrial facilities over last 40 years. Fishbone Diagram is applied to analyze the causes that lead to accidents. Corrective actions are also provided to help operating engineers handling similar situations in the future. The results show that 74% of accidents occurred in petroleum refineries, oil terminals or storage. Fire and explosion account for 85% of the accidents. There were 80 accidents (33%) caused by lightning and 72 (30%) caused by human errors including poor operations and maintenance. Other causes were equipment failure, sabotage, crack and rupture, leak and line rupture, static electricity, open flames etc. Most of those accidents would have been avoided if good engineering have been practiced.

https://www.technokontrol.com/pdf/storagetank-firesstudy.pdf

Cheng-Chung Lin

Papers

A study of storage tank accidents