A study on preventing runaway reaction of batch reactor by installing the safety instrumented system (SIS)

Abstract

There have been multiple chemical incidents which involved runaway reaction in the exothermic batch reactors (e.g. synthetic polymer reaction). Runaway reaction commonly refers to the abnormal exothermic reaction when cooling water fails to operate and the temperature inside the reactor increases rapidly. Most commonly, synthetic polymer reactors are operated and controlled by the Basic Process Control System (BPCS) and the safety valve or/and rupture disks are installed for the protection and safety. These measures, however, are limiting in terms of detecting abrupt changes in temperature (and pressure) in advance when a runaway reaction takes place. This research suggests the use of batch reactor along with Safety Instrumented System (SIS) in addition to the current practice of BPCS. As for the Safety Instrumented Functions (SIF) of the SIS, a 2003 voting is installed as a sensor, 2 channels as a logic solver, and a 1002 voting is utilized as final elements.