A review of safety indices for process design

Several indices have been developed as a measure of safety for different pieces of equipment, use of chemicals and operating conditions in transformation processes. Current efforts are being observed on the application of such types of metrics as part of the design of a process. This application focuses on the synthesis of inherently safer designs. It is then important to recognize proper safety metrics that can be applied from the early design stage of a chemical process. In this paper a review on the development of safety indices, with particular emphasis on their application for process design, is presented. The type of information and the output one obtains from the application of such indices is described. Some examples of recent applications that include safety as part of the design of several chemical processes are given.