Corrosion Risk for Process Safety in the Chemical Industry

The aim of this work is to analyze how corrosion risk management influences process safety. Both issues occupy an important niche in the chemical industry. Corrosion risk management includes identifying, analyzing, assessing, and managing corrosion hazards. Process safety is a discipline that focuses on preventing fires, explosions, and accidental releases at chemical process facilities. Corrosion can cause all these detrimental events. There is much literature about both topics, corrosion risk, and process safety, separately, but there are nearly no research works concerning intersection and influence. The level of corrosion failure and its consequences, defining corrosion risk, may be different: the leak of crude oil, natural gas, water, liquid and gaseous hazardous chemicals, fire, explosion, damages, deterioration of the environment, injuries, and death of people and animals. Due to the biological and psychological properties of human nature, we are unlikely to exclude human mistakes. We should pay significant attention to education, dissemination of information, knowledge transfer, collaboration, and communication. Correct corrosion risk management gives rise to the improvement of process safety at stages of design, fabrication, implementation, erection, service, and maintenance of equipment and constructions in the chemical industry. For this realization, specific corrosion mitigation strategies and technologies are described. They are successfully implemented in the chemical industry. It shows how corrosion management and process safety management can be better integrated into practice. The future consideration of the prognosis of corrosion risk with process safety is connected with corrosion modeling. Limitations and challenges of such a forecast are discussed too. Special educational and training programs are developed to help engineers, scientists, professionals, students, and managers learn about corrosion science and engineering