M. Sam Mannan

Texas A&M University | TAMU · Department of Chemical Engineering, Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center

Experiments on detonation onset behind two solid obstructions with uneven blockage ratio (BR) and opening shape were carried out in premixed, stoichiometric, hydrogen-oxygen mixtures at 20 kPa. Three geometric features of the second obstruction (OB2) were investigated: the opening shape, BR, and minimum opening vertical dimension (d/λ). Obstruction...

Flare gas integration with a cogeneration plant benefits from utilizing waste gases containing high heating value hydrocarbons as a supplemental fuel to the boilers. A key challenge in integrating flare gas with a cogeneration system is the need to ensure operational safety and satisfactory performance. Conventional hazard identification technique...

Flare gas utilization in a cogeneration plant is an attractive proposition considering its environmental and economic incentives. Evaluation of the operational risk of integrating flare gas with cogeneration is complex due to the uncertainty in flare gas quality and process conditions. The current study delves into the change in operational risk af...

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is widely used to cost-effectively store and transport natural gas. However, a spill of LNG can create a vapor cloud, which can potentially cause fire and explosion. High expansion (HEX) foam is recommended by the NFPA 11 to mitigate the vapor hazard and control LNG pool fire. In this study, the parameters that affect HE...

Styrene is a reactive monomer commonly used to produce polystyrene and other copolymers. Unintended thermal runaway polymerization reactions of styrene keep reoccurring and have led to catastrophic consequences. One of the possible causes of these runaway incidents involves the contamination of the styrene monomer by incompatible species, which was...

Increasing globalization has made many chemical supply chains large, interdependent and complex. Process incidents often affect the reliability of a supply chain and can cause large disruptions at different segments of the industry. We propose an optimization-based framework that systematically takes into account the trade-offs between process safe...

Abnormal process situation may lead to tremendous negative impact on sustainability, wellbeing of workers and adjacent communities, company's profit, and stability of supply chains. Failure of equipment and process subsystems are among the primary causes of abnormal situations. The conventional approach in handling failure-based abnormal situations...

Uncontrolled release of flammable gases and liquids can lead to the formation of flammable vapor clouds. When their concentrations are above the lower flammable limit (LFL), or ½ LFL for conservative evaluation, fires and explosions can happen in the presence of an ignition source. The objective of this work is to develop highly efficient consequen...

Propane is used in various products regularly in day to day life. Often the hazards due to consumer propane products are overlooked. The events due to consumer propane are usually medium- to high-frequency low-consequence events. The present study analyzes the trends in injuries from 2002 to 2016 with various factors like sex, location, time, and a...

Oil spills are the uncontrolled release of liquid hydrocarbon by ruptured pipelines and tanker hulls, or blowouts and leaks from offshore storage facilities and drilling rigs, either by faulty human behaviors or inevitable natural aging processes. Spills cause disastrous environmental and economic consequences, with the effects of marine habitat da...

In the Arctic environment, the fluid temperature in the pipeline can drop below the freezing point of water, which causes wax and ice to form on the pipeline surface. Solid formation on the pipeline surface can lead to flow assurance and process safety issues, such as blockage of the pipeline, pipeline component failure, and release of hazardous li...

Although industrial denotations in semi-open and congested geometries are often neglected by many practitioners during risk assessment, recent studies have shown that industrial detonations might be more common than previously believed. Therefore, from the explosion safety perspective, it becomes imperative to better assess industrial detonation ha...

Methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) oxidation via H2O2 with tungsten-based polyoxometalate catalysts has gained much attention with an ever-growing body of knowledge focusing on the development of environmentally benign processes in chemical industry. In this study, two calorimetry techniques, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and Phi-TEC II adiabatic...

With the rapid development of chemical process plants worldwide, the safe storage of hazardous chemicals continues to be an important topic. Chemical warehouse incidents related to fire and explosion are reported constantly. These incidents not only cause direct economic loss but also harm the local environment. Therefore, an accurate hazard identi...

The current study aims to advance a procedure development process that will create procedures as effective safeguards. Several past incidents identified that many current procedural systems failed to support workers conducting their work safely and effectively. There is currently a dearth of systematic inquiry regarding the procedure development pr...

Microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) is a microbial community assisted degradation of materials affecting chemical processing and oil and gas industries. MIC has been implicated in incidents involving loss of containment of hazardous hydrocarbons which have led to fires and explosions, economic and environmental impact. The interplay betwee...

The explosion in a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) powered forklift in Louisiana, USA in May 2018 and the resulting fatality highlights the need for the improved safety of this technology. Apart from the safety concerns, PEMFC durability has been an important issue towards its further commercialization. Both the safety and durability con...

With the growth of academic institutions, the number of labs handling hazardous chemicals has increased. Although the chemicals used in academic institutions are well-known, the dosage, usage, and management of these chemicals pose significant threat to researchers at all levels. As a step towards incident prevention, a laboratory incident database...

Risk matrices are widely used to present results of qualitative and semi-quantitative risk assessment for risk management decision making. There are different types of risk matrix category definitions according to the function and risk acceptance criteria. This paper reviews some general weaknesses of current risk matrices and proposes a method to...

The homogeneous phosphotungstic acid catalyzed N‐oxidation of alkylpyridines by hydrogen peroxide has important applications in pharmaceutical and fine chemical industries. Current industry practice is to employ a semi‐batch reactor with gradual dosing of hydrogen peroxide into an alkylpyridine/catalyst solution under isothermal conditions. However...

This paper demonstrates the successful implementation of an artificial neural network to accurately predict the designated thermal radiation distance for jet fire, early pool fire and late pool fire hazard consequence analysis. Specifically, integrated feedforward neural network models employing backpropagation Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm were tr...

Process design and technology selection are driven by multiple objectives including technical, economic, environmental, safety, and resilience drivers. Traditionally, techno-economic analyses have been used to select and optimize process design. Subsequently, environmental, safety, and resilience issues have been included in post-design analysis. W...

With the advances in digitization, Information Technology (IT), and connected devices, data are becoming plentiful. And with the past 30 years of developments of Artificial Intelligence tools leading to great enhancements in dealing with various levels and types of uncertainty, much has become tangible, where in the past it used to remain vague and...

Recently, there has been a growing interest in resilience-based systems approaches in order to address the challenges of process safety and risk management. One such approach, namely the Process Resilience Analysis Framework (PRAF), considers the processes as socio-technical systems that are complex in nature and deteriorate as a function of time....

Industrial systems are monitored and controlled by sensors and actuators. The signals from these instruments are mostly configured as alarms in the control system which alerts the plant operators in case of an abnormal process event. A higher number of alarms appearing on the operator screen signifies poor system performance and results in addition...

Flame propagation and explosion behavior of hydrogen-based mixtures remain critical issues for explosion safety in nuclear power plants and refineries. Research in this area has shown that the presence of confinement and obstruction in the flame path may enhance flame acceleration due to an increase in flame instabilities resulting from flame-obsta...

Benzoyl peroxide (BPO) is one of the most commonly used industrial organic peroxides; however, thermal decomposition of BPO is self-accelerating and can cause fires and explosions; therefore, thermal behavior of BPO decomposition needs to be understood clearly. In this paper, the experimental study of thermal decomposition of solid benzoyl peroxide...

Electrostatic ignition has triggered significant fire/explosion incidents in liquid processing industries including chemical, oil/gas, food, pharmaceutical and transportation. In this work, the impact of gas-velocity and temperature on the electrostatic energy accumulation in a scrubber column was studied. An in-situ charge measurement apparatus co...

In this work, various calorimetric and analytical techniques were implemented to identify reaction pathways and safety issues associated with the 2-octanol to 2-octanone two liquid phase catalytic reaction oxidative using aqueous hydrogen peroxide as oxidant, sodium tungstate (Na2WO4) as catalyst and methyltri-n-octylammonium hydrogen sulfate [CH3(...

Polymerization reactions have caused a number of serious incidents in the past; they are prone to reaction runaways because of their exothermic and autoaccelerating nature. To minimalize the risk, the reaction is commonly performed in a solvent as empirical industrial practice. In this work, the thermal runaway hazards of the ethylbenzene-styrene s...

The bioprocessing industry is regarded as one of the fastest growing sectors with an estimated compound annual growth rate of 8.6%. The global market for biopharmaceuticals is projected to rise to a market value of USD 727.1 billion by 2025. Due to the unique nature of bioprocessing industries wherein micro-organisms are employed to manufacture the...

Fire/explosion due to ammonium nitrate (AN) decomposition poses significant safety hazards which are exacerbated in the presence of salts including potassium chloride (KCl). In this work, key thermal parameters of AN decomposition over a range of KCl mass fraction were experimentally measured using advanced reactive chemical screening tool (ARSST)....

The roofing industry makes use of bitumen to build and repair roofs of residential and commercial structures. It is therefore necessary to transport the material over roadways and into residential and light commercial areas within cities. This is oftentimes accomplished by hauling the material behind trucks in large tankers that often have capaciti...

Abstract Janus colloidal surfactants with opposing wettabilities are receiving attention for their practical application in industry. Combining the advantages of molecular surfactants and particle-stabilized Pickering emulsions, Janus colloidal surfactants generate remarkably stable emulsions. Here we report a straightforward and cost-efficient str...

The risks in natural gas industries are perceived to be lower than in many upstream and downstream oil and gas operations, yet process safety incidents keep happening. Synergistic deployment of advanced process safety methods, technologies, strong safety management systems, and best‐in‐class safety culture can prevent future incidents. This chapter...

Natural gas consumption has increased as it is a cleaner energy source when compared to coal or petroleum. It can be stored in its liquid form as liquefied natural gas (LNG) because it has a much lower liquid volume. This has allowed ease of storage and transportation enabling it to be used as a global commodity. In case of an incident resulting in...

Identification of inherently safer and intensified reaction conditions is a vital step for transformation of traditional batch/semi-batch synthesis to continuous operation. Speeding up reactions is challenged by several safety and efficiency issues such as thermal runaway risk, side reactions, final product degradation and reactor overpressure. Thi...

There are uncertainties involved in the risk assessment of process systems operations. Also, systems are complex and deteriorate gradually with time or due to exposure to expected or unexpected disturbances/events. Questions such as, what is the frequency of a process upset?, can we predict incidents?, are yet to be explored and answered. With the...

The study of the liquid-liquid equilibrium (LLE) between 2,6-lutidine, 2,6-lutidine-N-oxide and water is important since it has the potential to influence the overall rate of the N-oxidation reaction involving these chemicals. The hydrogen peroxide, which is used as an oxidant to convert the lutidine into N-oxide, decomposes vigorously in a phase s...

In a process plant system, safe and reliable operations are highly sensitive to utilities such as power, steam, cooling water, nitrogen, and instrument air. These play an important role or act as safety barriers. This is because a disturbance in their supply is likely to affect process operations downstream, may reduce the production efficiency, an...

Predicting a kick timely and efficiently is often a challenging task due to the complexities of drilling and other well intervention activities. This work proposes a leading indicators-based approach to assess drilling operations for predicting kicks and preventing blowouts. A cause-based methodology is proposed to develop sets of leading indicator...

The objective of this experimental research work is to determine several key parameters of an LNG pool fire on land through a field test. The pool fire was conducted in the largest pit at Brayton Fire Training Field in College Station, Texas. The mass burning rate was 0.186 kg/(s m2) using the thermocouple method. Through the analysis of images fro...

Disasters have revealed persistent challenges for incident management systems in preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disruptive events. Such challenges have been reflected in recent catastrophic events such as natural disasters, industrial accidents, and terrorist attacks. To address the challenges, a need for resilience of incident m...

Written procedures are an important artifact in maintaining the safety in high risk industrial operations. Procedures set out the steps required to complete safety and process critical tasks. However, as Sidney Dekkar noted, while procedures spell out how to do the job safely, “following all the procedures can lead to an inability to get the job do...

The development of systems with complex interactions has led to limitations which are reflected in performance including reliability and safety of the systems. Concurrent developments of frameworks to represent and analyze complexity have aided the understanding of complexity in human-machine systems. The methodology and framework presented is prop...

Over the last few decades, the demand for hydrogen has significantly grown. Its high-energy content and relatively small environmental effect make it an ideal energy source and chemical feedstock. However, the perceived high risk of hydrogen in the eyes of society is a key challenge that has to be addressed before any future widespread utilization...

Liquefaction of natural gas is an effective way of easily storing and transporting natural gas because of its high ratio of liquid to vapor densities. Any spill of liquefied natural gas (LNG) can result in the formation of a vapor cloud, which cannot only cause asphyxiation but can also migrate downwind near ground level because of a density greate...

Accurate data of flammability limits for flammable gases and vapors are needed to prevent fires and explosions. The flammability limit, which is the maximum or minimum fuel concentration at which a gas mixture is flammable in a given atmosphere, has been studied for decades. However, due to differences in measurement conditions and equipment used,...

Risk assessment is essential for various purposes such as facility siting, safeguarding, and licensing. Hazard identification (HAZID), which suffers greatly from incompleteness, is still the weakest link in risk assessment. Of course, this recognition is not new and many efforts have been spent to improve the situation, of which some have been rath...

The benefits of achieving excellence in process safety are multifold: it reduces the probability of chemical incidents, mitigates the consequences of incidents when they occur, and provides effective emergency response. In addition, excellence in process safety contributes to sustainability, quality, and improved productivity. While most people wou...

Facility siting and layout configuration are essential factors during design and expansion of any industrial installation. In the recent past, cost-driven layout arrangements and the proximity of chemical facilities to densely populated areas, among other factors, have also contributed to the severity and propagation of various chemical incidents....

Organophosphorus compounds (OPCs) have long been known to have significant fire suppression capabilities but were outclassed by Halon 1301 due to toxicity concerns. Recent interest in finding replacements for Halon 1301 has provided an impetus to reconsider OPCs. To better understand the mechanism by which OPCs suppress flames, more information abo...

The Chemical Process Industry has witnessed an increase in process safety challenges and changes in the global public perception of risk. The key hazard identification and analysis methods used in the industry follow a univariate analysis which limits them in their approach to consider multiple factors, complex interactions among system components,...

The use of metrics in risk assessment and management of chemical process systems is a well-known area of research. There are numerous sources, which provide a comprehensive list of such metrics categorized into leading or lagging and technical or social. However, the significance of these metrics to overall risk and resilience assessment of the sys...

In recent years, the chemical process industry has witnessed increased process safety management challenges. One of the initial steps in process safety and risk management of any facility is hazard identification and analysis. Two types of factors: 1) technical (e.g., equipment malfunction), and 2) social (e.g., human and organizational factors) ar...

By modifying the dispersion system and the ignition delay time, and hence the flow field and turbulence intensity during the combustion process, various 20 L dust explosion vessels have been calibrated to give results comparable to the 1 m³ vessel as prescribed in the former ISO standard (ISO-6184, 1985). However, the results obtained from experime...

The growing demand for petrochemical products and the implementation of new process technology have made the petrochemical plants more complex, therefore, it becomes more challenging to manage the risk. Traditionally, additional layers of protection were added to prevent incidents, which further adds complexity to the existing process. Inherently s...

Further improvements in modern chemical kinetics mechanisms using laminar flame speeds require an understanding of the uncertainty and precision of the measurement and hence its limitations. From an inspection of the literature, it was found that laminar flame speed values of a basic methane–air mixture could depend on what measuring technique is e...

In order to eliminate fire incidents from occurring onboard offshore oil and gas facilities, it is crucial to have a better understanding of the causes behind them. Such understanding can be achieved through identification of the underlying causes that led to the previous incidents. Current paper focuses on analyzing investigation reports of 137 fi...

During the last decade, inherent safety has emerged as an area of interest in both academic and industrial research. Various regulatory bodies have enforced the consideration of inherently safer design alternatives. This enforcement, however, may not serve the purpose of reducing the risk associated with process incidents due to the drawback of ris...

Risks associated with transportation of Class 3 packing group II & III hazardous materials in transport by motor carriers were investigated. Incident data of transportation of Class 3 materials was collected from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) database for a period of 10 years (2005–2014). The collected incident...

Using nanofiller additives in the polymer matrix to form nanocomposites is a potential way of reducing the flame spread and enhancing flame retardancy of polymeric materials during fire. To understand the fire reaction properties and the relative performance of flame-retardant additives in polymer during well-developed fire, neat polystyrene, polys...

Written procedures can play an integral role in mitigating risks and hazards in industries such as petrochemical, nuclear, and aviation. However, failure to adhere to procedures has resulted in major incidents. While there have been multiple studies investigating procedures in the aviation and nuclear industries, a comprehensive study of the high-r...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the field of big data analytics. It has been established that there exist large amounts of data in the energy industry. However, there is a need to develop methods combining domain knowledge to transform this data into meaningful information to return business intelligence. The existing lite...

To improve the fundamental understanding of dust dispersion with application to explosion safety, a series of experiments was conducted to elucidate the effect of particle size and size polydispersity on dust-layer dispersion behind moving shock waves. Aluminum samples of various average sizes (D3,2 = 1.7–30.3 μm) with varying polydispersity (σD =...

On June 5, 2017, there was a Vapor Cloud Explosion (VCE) at JinYu Petrochemical Co. Ltd. During unloading of liquified natural gas, the gas leaked from the truck and formed a vapor cloud, then the vapor cloud met with the electrical sparks in the plant laboratory, and an explosion occurred. This incident caused significant casualties and property l...

Violent decomposition and explosion of ammonium nitrate induced by a fire present potentially a serious threat to personnel, facilities, and nearby community. One of the most recent incidents involving ammonium nitrate occurred on 17 April 2013, in West, Texas, killing 15 people and injuring more than 250 people; this incident has caused heated dis...

Workers of oil and gas extraction industries are exposed to multiple safety hazards, resulting in high fatality rates. Texas has the highest employment and fatality of oil and gas industries. Current regulations that apply to the industries in Texas require no safety management system (SMS) and inadequately address the safety hazards associated wit...

The cylindrical tanks are widely used to store liquids in the industry, among which LNG poses a unique hazard to personnel, assets and surrounding community due to its flammability and cryogenic nature. There are regulations, such as NFPA 59A, to require a dike for mitigating the risk in case of a catastrophic failure of LNG tanks. The dike helps t...

Industrial alarm systems are very critical for the efficient and safe operation and control of plants. Alarms are used to inform the operator about possible process deviations from the normal so that the operator can take appropriate corrective action. Alarm activation and the corresponding response from the operator together serve as one of the cr...

Risk perception plays an important role in risk communication and chemical incident prevention when engaging with different groups of people. Risk perception of lay people emphasizes the individual experience of intuitive judgment and subjective cognition. To study the mechanism of this process on chemical incidents, three causality feedback loops...

Socio-technical systems, such as those in oil and gas, or the petrochemical and energy industries, are escalating in complexity, a consequence of increasingly advanced technologies, organizational constructs, and business functions that interact and depend on one another. These dynamic social and technological elements, coupled with the high risk i...

Risk management challenges and continuous increase of global public aversion to hazards and risks associated with the process industry have been observed in the recent years. In order to manage process industry risk, several studies and methods have been developed and are currently used. The authors believe that two types of interacting factors: 1)...

Qualitative risk analysis is focused on applying methods to prevent accidents in diverse process plants. However, the numerical number resulting in the QRA tells nothing about the ability for systems’ recovery if an upset related to safety occurs in the process. Hence a resilience study is required to produce this additional information related to...

The N-oxidation of alkylpyridines is an industrially important reaction since it produces alkylpyridine N-oxides that are pharmaceutical intermediates. The aqueous hydrogen peroxide used to oxidize the alkylpyridine has a tendency to decompose during the reaction thereby introducing serious hazards for the process. The decomposition is accelerated...

After the restriction on several ozone-depleting compounds, including the high efficiency fire suppressant Halon 1301(CF3Br), several alternatives have been proposed. Among them, HFC-227-(C3HF7) and HFC-125 (C2HF5) represent two of the most-used fire suppressants in the industry because of their environmentally favorable properties. Due to their in...