The Hazard and Operability study (HAZOP) (ISO 31010 & IEC61882) is a leading and well-established process hazard analysis (PHA) method. However, previous research indicated weaknesses of HAZOP such as not being able to provide a quantitative output, guidewords excess, and compound deviations which may diminish the effectiveness of a HAZOP study.

This research presents case studies to illustrate the limitation of current HAZOP methodology; problems to combine the HAZOP result into a fault tree analysis and a method to streamlining the bridging process of HAZOP and fault tree analysis for a quantitative result.

Current HAZOP limitation discussion is inadequate since most of them are just sharing of experiences. Using a case study advances our understanding of HAZOP and validate...[ Read more ]

The Hazard and Operability study (HAZOP) (ISO 31010 & IEC61882) is a leading and well-established process hazard analysis (PHA) method. However, previous research indicated weaknesses of HAZOP such as not being able to provide a quantitative output, guidewords excess, and compound deviations which may diminish the effectiveness of a HAZOP study.

This research presents case studies to illustrate the limitation of current HAZOP methodology; problems to combine the HAZOP result into a fault tree analysis and a method to streamlining the bridging process of HAZOP and fault tree analysis for a quantitative result.

Current HAZOP limitation discussion is inadequate since most of them are just sharing of experiences. Using a case study advances our understanding of HAZOP and validates limitations discussed in the literature.

Based on the HAZOP litmitation, this thesis employed a new deviation classification PVL approach to ensure the HAZOP is able to cover all major types of hazard interaction, stream to component, component to stream and component to component. The purpose of establishing a master node is to separate the analysis of these interactions. After applying the new method, HAZOP result reduced meaningless repetitive guidewords significantly and the analytical results were grouped from the top hazard event down to other less hazardous events.

In this research, the hazard scenario model is used to facilitate the process of importing the HAZOP result into a fault tree analysis and illustrates how the propagation pathway of faults can be incorporated into the brainstorming process.

Modern processes have become more complicated. Therefore, the current scope of risk analysis method may not be comprehensive enough. In order to cope with the need to anlyse modern proces, this research illustrates how dynamic fault tree (DFT) analysis with a Markov chain approach integrates with HAZOP analysis offering insights into a quantitative result and the consideration of the time-dependent behaviour of failure order.