Fire Versus Non-Fire Contingencies: A Study of Pressure-Relief Device Sizing Risks

There are tens of thousands of industrial manufacturing facilities operating throughout the world. Each chemical plant, petroleum refinery, pharmaceutical plant and other manufacturing facility has equipment and piping systems that operate under pressure. In the event of excessive overpressure, equipment or piping failures could result in economic loss to business, environmental contamination, and health and safety risks. To reduce such risks, equipment and piping systems that operate under pressure must be protected from excessive overpressure. This is accomplished with the installation of pressure-relief devices, which must be properly sized and specified for the intended service conditions. More specifically, overpressure protection is provided by pressure-relief devices that are sized, selected, specified and installed for the postulated governing overpressure contingency. To adequately size a pressure-relief device to provide overpressure protection for equipment and piping, several relief event scenarios always should be considered. In the U.S.A., federal and state regulations require operating industrial facilities to have risk management programs in place that include the design basis for safety-relief systems installed to protect pressurized equipment from overpressure. For new installations, the pressure-relief system design philosophy should be established during the project design phase. However, for process facilities that have been in operation for many years, the original design basis and calculations for the safety-relief devices often are no longer available. For existing pressure-relieving installations, fitness-for-service assessments should include verification of the relief device size and specification, and review and substantiation of required documentation. This paper presents results from a study intended to examine which overpressure relief contingency, if any, most often governs the size of relief devices that are used to protect equipment and piping systems. The required elements of a pressure-relieving system sizing and documentation program are described. The author emphasizes seven relief contingencies to be considered when sizing pressure-relief devices. Some restrictions and limitations of the codes and standards that are applied for design guidance of pressure-relieving systems are challenged. For this study, relief device sizing data was compiled from a number of chemical and petrochemical project applications to provide a reasonable sample of contingencies that governed the sizes of existing and new safety-relief valves and rupture disks. The study results show that a significant number of pressure-relief devices presently installed in the U.S.A. likely are undersized. This further suggests that, worldwide, an alarming number of pressure-relief devices may be undersized.