A Quantitative Individual Risk Assessment Method
in Process Facilities with Toxic Gas Release Hazards:
A Combined Scenario Set and CFD Approach
Bo Zhang,a† Yue Liu,a† and Shen Qiaob
a
Department of Safety Science and Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), Qingdao, People’s Republic of China;
zhangbo@upc.edu.cn (for correspondence)
b
SEPCO Electric Power Construction Corporation, Jinan, People’s Republic of China
Published online 2 October 2018 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/prs.11979
Individuals working in process facilities containing toxic
gases may face gas releases and poisoning risks. Many studies
regarding individual risk (IR) have been carried out on a
worst scenario basis. However, the worst scenario-based
approach cannot represent realistic release risks and may
overestimate the IR. In this study, an approach based on
complete accident scenario set (CASS) and computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) is proposed to quantitatively assess IR of
toxic gas release in process facilities. By combining the gas
leakage probability and joint distribution probability of the
wind direction and speed, a CASS can be built. The CFD
method is used to predict the concentration field of gas release
and dispersion. Then, the toxic gas concentration can be con-
verted to poisoning fatality probabilities according to the dose–
response model. A virtual IR contour can finally be defined by
the accumulative assessment of all release scenarios. A case
study of an IR area classification in a natural gas process and
carbon dioxide recycle terminal processing facility that con-
tains an ammonia refrigeration system is also investigated.
With the proposed methodology, the quantitatively classified IR
level in process facilities can provide scientific references for
safety decision makers. © 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engi-
neers Process Saf Prog 38: 52–60, 2019
Keywords: complete accident scenario set; computational
fluid dynamics; toxic gas; individual risk; dose–response
model; ammonia poisoning
1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
Currently, the safety of toxic chemical process facilities has
aroused great concern since the toxic chemicals in these facili-
ties may severely impact workers, the public and the environ-
ment. Several accidents occurred in recent years have brought
many casualties and enormous economic losses, such as the
chlorine release accident in Atchison, Kansas, on October
21, 2016 [1], hydrogen fluoride leakage accident in Gumi,
This study was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of
Shandong Province (ZR2016EEM27) and the Fundamental Research
Funds for the Central Universities (18CX05028A).
† been proposed and widely used [18,20,24]. Another approach
These authors contributed equally to this work.
© 2018 American Institute of Chemical Engineers
52 March 2019
South Korea, on September 27, 2012 [2], and the anhydrous
ammonia release accident in Theodore, Alabama, on August
23, 2010 [3]. Also, in China, according to the statistical data
from 2002 to 2012, there were 55 poisoning accidents that
occurred in process industry, which caused 81 deaths and
917 injuries [4]. These above accident cases show that people
who work in the process facilities or live in adjacent areas are
facing risks of toxic gas poisoning. Therefore, it is very impor-
tant to develop strategies to predict accident scenarios and
evaluate the risk of poisoning for providing mitigation mea-
sures in process plants.
Many researches concerning both the individual risks
(IR) and society risks (SR) inside the process plants have been
carried out [5–7]. Normally IR was defined as the probability of
death to an individual at any particular location due to all
undesired events [8,9]. The total IR at each point was equal to
the sum of the IR of all scenarios effects at that point [10],
whereas SR expressed the cumulative risk to groups of people
who might be affected by such accident scenarios [11]. This
paper will focus on the IR inside the process plants since the
individuals may be facing a more direct exposure to toxic
gases under release conditions.
The IR evaluation is also in the scope of quantitative risk
analysis (QRA) [10]. QRA is the prevailed risk assessment
method and has been widely used in process safety related
areas, including design of safety measures [12], safety manage-
ment and decision making [11,13,14], developing risk-based
maintenance and inspection strategies [15–17], and so forth.
The implementation of QRA mainly contains two steps: sce-
nario envisaging and consequence analysis, in which scenario
envisaging serves as the basis for the whole risk quantification
[18]. Some scenario envisaging techniques have been pro-
posed, such as worst accident scenarios (WAS) [19],
maximum-credible accident scenarios (MCAS) [20], reference
accident scenarios (RAS) [21], worst maximum credible acci-
dental scenarios (WMCAS) [22], and so forth. As we know, the
WAS approach is the most commonly used method to assess
release consequences [19,23]. However, the WAS may be the
exaggerated situation and may overestimate the consequences.
In order to overcome this shortage, the concept of MCAS has
to accident scenarios identification was RAS, which was
Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1)
Figure 1. Framework of the methodology.

presented based on the accidental risk assessment methodol- 2. METHODS

ogy for industries (ARAMIS) project [21]. Although RAS has The framework of the proposed methodology is shown in
some obvious advantages, the complex calculation process still Figure 1. The major steps are described in detail in the follow-
limits its application [22]. Furthermore, on the basis of WAS, ing sections.
MCAS, and RAS, the method of WMCAS was put forward for
risk assessment [22]. More recently, the concept of a complete 2.1 Release Scenario Set
accident scenario set (CASS) was proposed during the research 2.1.1 Leakage Sources
of optimization of gas detectors placement in process installa- The leakage sources can be identified by the database refer-
tions, since the optimized network of gas detectors needs to ences, equipment analysis under experienced engineers’ guid-
achieve a better performance under all possible release scenar- ance, and so forth. Once the leakage sources in the facilities are
ios [25–27]. Some scenarios with low occurrence probabilities located, the leak rate can be acquired by an analogy method,
but unacceptable consequences, which are known as tail- which means we can estimate the rate by comparing the target
behavior, should also be considered [28]. The CASS approach equipment with similar ones that have a leak data record in
available databases. In this study, the commercial software
considers both the release sources and wind fields to build the
DNV-LEAK is used to calculate the leak rate [25]. In LEAK, the
release scenario set with each scenario’s probability calculated.
generic leak rate of each equipment type with different release
In this paper, the CASS approach will be used to envisage the hole sizes is obtained based on the historical failure data, which
release scenarios for the evaluation of IR. is derived from the hydrocarbon release database that has been
Another important prelude for QRA is consequence predic- compiled by the UK Health and Safety Executive over a 20-year
tion. The toxic gas dispersion consequence prediction tech- period. The leakage source set can be described as Eq. 1.
niques may vary a lot according to different accuracy
requirements. Fast predictions can be achieved by some soft-
L ¼ ½leh ð0 < e ≤ q,0 < h ≤ 4Þ ð1Þ
ware packages such as the DNV PHAST [29], ALOHA [30],
HAZDIG [31], and so forth, which are mainly integrated with
Gaussian, Plume, and Puff experience models. However, the
experience models are derived from experiment data in open
areas without obstacles. There still exists a limitation that they
cannot be used in a complex environment with obstacles, such
as inside of a process installation or a building [32–34]. In
recent years, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method has
become an attractive and promising technique for gas release
consequence modeling [35,36]. A lot of researches have
proved that if a detailed consequence under complex environ-
ment is needed, using commercial software packages such as
ANSYS-FLUENT [37,38], FLACS [39], and CFX [40], which are
based on computational fluid dynamics, would be good
choices.
The aim of this article is to propose a quantitative IR assess-
ment method in process facilities with toxic gas release haz-
ards that combines the scenario set and CFD method. Based
on the combination of the gas leakage frequency and the joint
distribution probability of wind direction and speed, a release
scenario set is constructed, and the occurrence frequency of
each release scenario is predicted. The concentration field of
gas dispersion is predicted by the commercial CFD code FLU-
ENT. The dose–response model is used to calculate the poi-
soning fatality ratio (FR) of exposed individuals in each release
scenario. Then, the cumulative IR can be acquired by each
scenario’s occurrence frequency and its FR. A case study in a Figure 2. Definition of the wind direction.
process facility containing ammonia is also provided to illus-
trate this method.

Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1) Published on behalf of the AIChE DOI 10.1002/prs March 2019 53
Table 1. Typical toxic gas leak accident. occurrence frequency, and the other various speeds can be
described by representative values between the maximum and
minimum speed with a certain interval. Then, the wind field
Date Location Consequences
set can be described by a combination of wind direction and
09/18/2015 Shandong Province, 215 people needed speed, as shown in Eq. 2.
China medical treatment,
5 people injured W ¼ ½wθv ð0 ≤ θ ≤ 16,0 ≤ v ≤ mÞ ð2Þ
seriously
09/07/2014 Ningxia Hui 41 people suffered
Autonomous Region, from acute ammonia Because of the independence of leakage sources and wind
China poisoning field, both variables are combined randomly to construct the
08/31/2013 Shanghai, China 15 deaths, 25 injured scenario set, as shown in Eq. 3.
06/03/2013 Dehui city, Jilin 121 deaths, 76 injured
Province, China
S ¼ fSθveh j0 ≤ θ ≤ 16,0 ≤ v ≤ m,0 < e ≤ q,0 < h ≤ 4g ð3Þ
10/22/2012 Honghu city, Hubei 479 people suffered
Province, China from ammonia
poisoning
08/05/2009 Chifeng city, Inner 246 injured, including 2.2 Assessment of the IR of Poisoning
Mongolia, China 21 ammonia The IR is the risk to an individual near the hazard, which
poisoning cases considers the nature, the likelihood and the time period of a
possible injury to an individual [42]. In this paper, the occur-
rence frequency of each scenario and corresponding individ-
ual exposure FR can be calculated to describe the IR values in
2.1.2 Wind Fields each interested or given location of a process facility. The con-
To set up the wind field set, the local historical meteorolog- centrations during the gas dispersion predicted by CFD can be
ical data including wind speed and direction were considered. used to evaluate the FR by the dose–response model. For
The wind direction can be divided into 16 directions with an instantaneous, time-varying releases, the toxic dose is esti-
interval of 22.5 (Figure 2) [41]. The wind speed, which should mated by integration or summation over several time incre-
be first considered, is the average speed since it has the largest ments [42], as shown with Eq. 4.

Figure 3. The diagram of the ammonia refrigeration system.

54 March 2019 Published on behalf of the AIChE DOI 10.1002/prs Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1)
Table 2. Leakage rate of the ammonia refrigeration system (per year).

Equipment ID Total Small Medium Large Catastrophic

V-1906 6.985E-03 5.277E-03 1.119E-03 2.798E-04 3.088E-04
V-1907 2.009E-03 1.636E-03 2.949E-04 5.751E-05 2.071E-05
V-1905 3.619E-02 3.160E-02 3.611E-03 6.357E-04 3.464E-04
C-1902 4.516E-03 3.668E-03 6.607E-04 1.535E-04 3.408E-05
E-1913 1.075E-02 8.786E-03 1.877E-03 5.908E-05 3.266E-05
E-1910 1.663E-03 1.354E-03 2.366E-04 3.613E-05 3.637E-05
E-1912 2.210E-03 1.837E-03 3.352E-04 2.451E-05 1.289E-05
E-1914 2.184E-03 1.816E-03 3.343E-04 2.115E-05 1.289E-05
E-1907 2.312E-03 1.925E-03 3.470E-04 2.724E-05 1.289E-05
E-1902 2.122E-03 1.763E-03 3.256E-04 2.099E-05 1.289E-05

ð t1 X
k
according to their frequencies and wind speeds. In this case,
V¼ C dt ≈
j
Ci Δti
j
ð4Þ the average wind speed scenarios were chosen since they
t0 i¼1
have an occurrence frequency of 83%. Additionally, special
attention was given to the maximum and second largest wind
Probit equations are derived as lines of best fit to percent- speed because they may enable the released toxic gas to dis-
age fatalities versus concentration and duration using log- perse in a wider range. Finally, eight scenarios were chosen to
probability plots or standard statistical packages, as shown establish the wind fields, which consisted of 92% of all possi-
with Eq. 5. ble situations (Table 3).
Based on the above approach, with a combination of
Pr ¼ A + B lnðV Þ ð5Þ 40 leakages and 8 wind fields, a total of 320 potential leak sce-
narios were set up. Considering the computation cost and the
For single exposure, the probit variable Pr can be related to frequency of possible scenarios, a selection criterion was set,
the FR P by Eq. 6 [37]. and the results are shown in Table 4. The scenario occurrence
probability is defined as the product of leakage probability
ð Pr − 5  2 and wind field occurrence probability. Finally, 82 scenarios
1
e−
x
P ¼ pffiffiffiffiffi 2 dx ð6Þ were chosen, which account for a portion of the 99.2% of all
2π −∞ scenario cumulative occurrence probabilities.
Considering the occurrence frequency of each gas release
scenario, the IR of scenario u in the location (x, y) is calculated
by Eq. 7. 3.3 Simulation of Gas Leak and Dispersion in the
Process Facility
IR u ðx,yÞ ¼ fu Pu ð7Þ Ammonia release and dispersion simulation are one of the
most important steps in this study. A facility geometry model
Finally, the IR of a given point can be obtained by accumu- was created by the CFD preprocessor GAMBIT. The computa-
lating the IRs of all potential scenarios, as shown with Eq. 8: tional domain has dimensions of 800 m in length, 700 m in

X
n
Table 3. Wind field set.
IRxy ¼ fu Pu ð8Þ
u¼1
No. Wind Direction Wind Speed (m/s) Frequency (%)
3. CASE STUDY 1 W 4.7 21
2 NNE 4.7 18.4
3.1 Description 3 NE 4.7 16.6
There were 16420 enterprises using liquid ammonia in 4 ES 4.7 14
China by the end of 2017 [43]. Several typical ammonia leak- 5 S 4.7 13
age accidents in China are presented in Table 1 [44]. In this 6 SW 34 4.5
article, an IR level classification in a natural gas process and 7 SSW 38 2.8
carbon dioxide recycle terminal (NGPCRT) processing facility 8 NNW 34 2
that contains an ammonia refrigeration system is introduced as
an example. The diagram of the ammonia refrigeration system
is shown in Figure 3.
Table 4. Number and probability of scenarios under different
3.2 Scenario Set selection criteria.
For the ammonia refrigeration system, 10 units were identi-
fied as ammonia containing. Considering the possibility of Frequency Scenario Number/ Cumulative
small, medium, large and catastrophic leakage, a total of Level Portion (%) Probability/Portion
40 leakage scenarios were confirmed. The leakage rate
10−3 46/14.3 0.0459/80.0
acquired from LEAK software is shown in Table 2.
10−4 82/25.6 0.0527/99.2
The wind field set is the combination of wind direction and
10−5 320/100 0.0532/100
speed. To achieve a balance between scenario integrity and
CFD computational costs, prior scenarios were chosen

Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1) Published on behalf of the AIChE DOI 10.1002/prs March 2019 55
width, and 200 m in height. The layout and the gambit model
of the factory are shown in Figure 4.
Mesh quality has an important influence on the CFD solu-
tion convergence. An unstructured grid is used for the mesh
generation of the computational domain. The mesh quality is
controlled by using a much more refined mesh near the sur-
face and leakage source [37]. The meshed grid is shown in
Figure 5. To achieve a balance between the simulation accu-
racy and computing costs, an analysis of grid dependency was
carried out. In this study, four types of grids were constructed
by varying the ratio of the “size function” in GAMBIT, as
shown in Table 5. Figure 6 displays the ammonia concentra-
tion comparisons of the 15 points at a time of 120 s predicted
by these four grids applied at the potential dispersion area,
downstream of the release source. The leakage hole diameter
is 0.15 m and the mass flow rate is 3.0 kg/s. As seen from the
diagram, the predictions are grid independent. Then, a 1:1.6
mesh model was chosen for the simulation. A polyhedral mesh
was also used to reduce the grid cell number and enhance the
computation speed and convergence. The final grid number
was reduced from 6,354,181 to 3,514,487.
Another important step before solving the equations is to
set up monitor points. In order to assess the inhalation toxicity

Figure 5. Meshed grid: (a) surface mesh of the total

computational domain, (b) surface mesh near the leakage source.
[Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

of the released gas, the height of monitor points should con-

form to the average height of human noses [37]. In all cases,
480 gas concentration monitor points at a 5 m distance were
set up. The monitoring points were divided into two layers:
one was placed at a 1.5 m height, which represents the breath-
ing zone height of the workers [45,46], and the other was
placed at 7.5 m height, which is the height of the worker’s
working platform over the height of the equipment (6 m). A
schema for these points is shown in Figure 7.

3.4 CFD Simulation and IR Results

Transient simulations were chosen to simulate with a stan-
dard k-e turbulence model [37]. Because the potential leak

Table 5. Grids used for the independent study.

Cell Number
Before Cell Number After
Grid Size Conversion to Conversion to
Type Function Polyhedra Polyhedra
Finer 1:1.4 6354181 3763974
Figure 4. Industry drawing: (a) CAD drawing and (b) Gambit Fine 1:1.6 5223643 3514487
model. [Color figure can be viewed at Medium 1:1.8 4846391 3423357
wileyonlinelibrary.com] Coarse 1:2.0 4690115 3401698

56 March 2019 Published on behalf of the AIChE DOI 10.1002/prs Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1)
 Figure 7. Location of the monitoring points. [Color figure can
be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

suggest the dispersion steady-state condition will be achieved

Figure 6. Comparison of the concentration of each
monitoring point in the four grids. [Color figure can be viewed
at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
may last for tens of minutes, it is not cost-effective to simulate
the entire leakage process. Furthermore, each monitoring point
will reach a constant concentration. Several sample simulations
within 10 min after the leakage. With this reference, a simula-
tion time step was set as 0.5 s with a leak time of 600 s.
Figure 8 demonstrates the scenario simulation result. The
ammonia poisoning FR at each monitoring point in this sce-
nario within 10 min can also be evaluated by the dose–
response model (Eq. 6), as shown in Figure 8d.
With the same method, CFD simulations of 82 scenarios
were carried out. The simulations were performed on a server

Figure 8. Examples of ammonia dispersion simulation results: (a) place of the selected monitoring points, (b) mole fraction of
ammonia, (c) ammonia concentration contours at 600 s, and (d) FR of the selected monitoring points. [Color figure can be viewed
at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1) Published on behalf of the AIChE DOI 10.1002/prs March 2019 57

Figure 9. The individual risk contours for the plant at a 1.5 m
height. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
with an Intel i7-4790 CPU (3.6 GHz and 32 GB RAM). The
average CPU time for one leakage and dispersion scenario
computation was approximately 40 h. The CFD simulation can
provide the real-time concentration of ammonia at each moni-
tor point in each scenario. Combined with the scenario pres-
ence probability, we can assess the cumulative ammonia
poisoning fatal probabilities with every release scenario con-
sidered. These probabilities can be calculated using Eqs. 7
and 8.
3.5 Visualization of the IR Level
After the calculation of the IR value, the result of cumulative
poisoning fatal probabilities still need to be expressed in a
more intuitive way. One example is to visualize the IR level
classification results in a process facility. According to several
IR standards and criteria: the maximum personal fatal risk
acceptable level is 10−4/a, and the personal fatal risk negligible
level is 10−6/a [47–49]. In this paper, the fatal risk is divided
into three levels. Area A represents the unacceptable risk area
(>10−4/a); B is the ALARP (as low as reasonably practicable to
lower the risk) area (10−6–10−4/a); and C is the negligible risk
area (<10−6/a). The contours stratified by using the IR value
acquired in Section 3.4 are presented in Figures 9 and 10. This
Figure 10. The individual risk contours for the plant at a
7.5 m height. [Color figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]
58 March 2019 Published on behalf of the AIChE
IR contour derived by this method can provide scientific refer-
ences for emergency management and safety policy decision
of the NGPCRT facility.
4. CONCLUSIONS AND PROSPECTS
In this article, a CASS and CFD combined approach is pro-
posed for IR level classification in process facilities. A review of
existing accident scenario identification methods has revealed
that there still exist a few limitations in current scenario envisag-
ing approaches. Hence, a CASS approach is needed for scenario
envisaging to get more realistic assessment results.
Furthermore, the CFD method was used to acquire the
toxic gas concentration in process facilities under gas release
scenarios, which has been proved to be efficient and accurate
by many studies. The FR in each scenario is evaluated by
dose–response model according to the toxic gas concentration
acquired from CFD simulation results. The accumulative FR
considering each scenario probability is calculated to represent
the comprehensive toxic gas release poisoning IR.
According to the current risk criteria, the IR results of all
monitor points can be classified to several levels and be dis-
played in the form of risk contours in a process facility. The
visualized IR contour of a process facility can provide an intui-
tive method of using these results in emergency management
and safety policy decisions.
In this study, in order to focus on the IR assessment, we
have not taken the gas detector network into consideration,
which may result in an overestimate of the IR values. In the
following studies, a model considering the alarm time of gas
detectors and personal evacuation will be investigated. This
model will produce a more accurate IR. Recently, the dynamic
risk assessment (DRA) method has been proposed as a contin-
uation of the QRA method [50]. We will also consider applying
DRA method to update the historical leakage data of each
equipment type to construct more accurate release scenarios.
Another research point lies in optimizing an evacuation path-
way under toxic gas release in process factories. This optimiza-
tion can also be achieved by using the CFD simulation data
and stochastic programming method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We also appreciate those who assisted us during this study,
the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive
comments and suggestions.
NOMENCLATURE
L leakage source collection
leh leakage type of equipment e
q number of equipment that may leak
h leakage hole size: small (1–10 mm), medium (10–
50 mm), large (50–150 mm), and catastrophic
(>150 mm)
W wind field set
wθv wind field whose wind direction is θ, and wind
speed is v
m maximum wind speed during the recent 10 years
S scenario set
Sθveh scenario indicating that the leakage type h occurred
in the equipment e, in a wind field with a direction
of θ and speed of v
Pu fatality ratio (FR) of the scenario u
A, constant variables, −35.9, 1.85, and 2 for ammonia,
B, andj respectively
V toxic dose
k total number of time intervals
x integration variable
Ci
j gas concentration at different points
t0 start time of contacting with the toxic gas
t1 end time of contacting with the toxic gas
DOI 10.1002/prs Process Safety Progress (Vol.38, No.1)
Δti exposure time duration
Pr probit variable
IRu(x, y) fatality ratio in the location (x, y) of accident scenario
u down inspection and maintenance interval estimation con-
IRxy fatality ratio in the location (x, y)
n total number of accident scenarios
fu frequency of accident scenario u
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