RISK ASSESSMENT FOR BLAST FURNACE USING FMEA

Abstract

Blast furnace is a tall reactor to process iron ore into pig iron, modern day blast furnace size range varies from 70 to 120 feet. Blast furnace iron making process is a complex task it has potential hazards like fire and explosion, co poisoning, hot metal sparks, heat stress, emission of air contaminants like particulate matter, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides etc. Organization need to take necessary steps to manage the hazards and its consequences to perform work safely. Various reliability engineering and risk assessment techniques are applied to improve the blast furnace safety to prevent the blast furnace workers from accidents. This paper aims to provide the necessity of risk assessment techniques for implementing safety in an integrated steel plant. Risk assessment using failure mode effect analysis was carried in an existing steel plant blast furnace capacity of 0.6MTPA(Metric Ton Per Annum) which produce around 1000 ton of hot metal called pig iron daily. Failure mode effect analysis one of the systematic risk assessment technique is applied to the each activity of the blast furnace operation to find out the potential failure modes and its effects with detection. Risk priority number, severity, detection, occurrence are the factors determined in this work are used to suggest the safety precautions. Risk priority number helps to find out the highest hazardous activities which need more attention than the other activities. Safety precautions suggested in this paper can prevent the occurrence of failures and protect the blast furnace workers from fatal accidents and injuries.