Safety assessment approach of hazard and operability (HAZOP) for sulfur recovery unit Claus reaction furnace package; blower; heat exchanger equipment in South Pars gas processing plant

• The novelty of the submitted paper as compared to the state of the art in the literature can be summarized below.
• For the first time the HAZOP study was considered to be implemented to cover both hazard and operability analysis of the sulfur recovery units main equipment such as Claus reaction furnace package, blower, and heat exchanger of South Pars gas processing plant.
• According to the less systematical attempts for preventing dangerous accidents in the SRU equipment we have used HAZOP study as a method of systematically identifying every conceivable process deviation, abnormal causes and adverse hazardous consequences in the SRU.

Different techniques and tools have been introduced for the analysis of process systems that each has their own capabilities namely HAZOP. HAZOP analysis is a process hazard analysis method that has been widely applied both within and outside the chemical processing industries. One of the process systems which require to be analyzed by these techniques is the sulfur recovery unit (SRU) of the gas processing plants. This paper presents the HAZOP analysis method which is employed to identify all the dangerous deviations, potential hazard, and operational problems possibly existing in the Claus reaction furnace package, blower, and heat exchanger equipments in the SRU. This allows a significant reduction in implementation costs, where the expected saving from risk reduction is high. The efficiency of SRU is strongly associated with the performance of those aforementioned equipments. However, it is important to point out that these equipments are the most important parts of the SRU. Useful recommendation is presented to reduce risk ranking. Finally, Cause and effect diagrams for Claus Burner in Start-up/Heating and Fuel Gas + Sour Gas Modes have been designed.