Editor-in-Chief
Manabu Shimada (Hiroshima University)

Associate Editor-in-Chiefs
Masahiro Shishido (Yamagata University)
Ken-Ichiro Sotowa (The University of Tokushima)

Editors
Choji Fukuhara (Shizuoka University)
Toshitaka Funazukuri (Chuo University)
Yoshihiro Hashimoto (Nagoya Institute of Technology)
Shunji Homma (Saitama University)
Jun-ichi Horiuchi (Kyoto Institute of Technology)
Yoshinori Itaya (Gifu University)
Masashi Iwata (Osaka Prefecture University)
Noriho Kamiya (Kyushu University)
In-Beum Lee (Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTEC))
Kouji Maeda (University of Hyogo)
Hideyuki Matsumoto (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST))
Michiaki Matsumoto (Doshisha University)
Nobuyoshi Nakagawa (Gunma University)
Tsuguhiko Nakagawa (Okayama Prefectural University)
Yasuya Nakayama (Kyushu University)
Masaru Noda (Fukuoka University)
Mikihiro Nomura (Shibaura Institute of Technology)
Eika W. Qian (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)
Yuji Sakai (Kogakuin University)
Noriaki Sano (Kyoto University)
Naomi Shibasaki-Kitakawa (Tohoku University)
Hiroshi Suzuki (Kobe University)
Nobuhide Takahashi (Shinshu University)
Kazuhiro Takeda (Shizuoka University)
Shigeki Takishima (Hiroshima University)
Yoshifumi Tsuge (Kyushu University)
Tomoya Tsuji (Nihon University)
Shigeyuki Uemiya (Gifu University)
Da-Ming Wang (National Taiwan University)
Takayuki Watanabe (Kyushu University)
Takuji Yamamoto (University of Hyogo)
Tetsuya Yamamoto (Nagoya University)
Masahiro Yoshida (Kagoshima University)
Yasuo Yoshimi (Shibaura Institute of Technology)
Miki Yoshimune (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST))

Editorial office:
The Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan
Kyoritsu Building, 4-6-19, Kohinata, Bunkyo-ku
Tokyo 112-0006, Japan
journal@scej.org

AIMS AND SCOPE:

Journal of Chemical Engineering of Japan, an official publication of the Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan, is dedicated to providing timely original research results in the broad field of chemical engineering ranging from fundamental principles to practical applications. Subject areas of this journal are listed below. Research works presented in the journal are considered to have significant and lasting value in chemical engineering.

Physical Properties and Physical Chemistry
Transport Phenomena and Fluid Engineering
Particle Engineering
Separation Engineering
Thermal Engineering
Chemical Reaction Engineering
Process Systems Engineering and Safety
Biochemical Food and Medical Engineering
Micro and Nano Systems
Materials Engineering and Interfacial Phenomena
Energy
Environment
Engineering Education

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There has been a recent surge in the number of disasters and incidents occurring in the process industry (e.g., the petrochemical, chemical, food and pharmaceutical industries). The reasons thereof include defects in process safety management (PSM); inadequate safety management systems in companies; inadequate knowledge among managers and insufficient information about the tasks undertaken and resultant erroneous operation and/or misjudgment; no standardization for the PSM activity; and other engineering factors. The purpose of PSM is to prevent industrial accidents by the establishment of the PSM system at the company level as well as an improvement in safety engineering techniques. Safety of chemical process plants can be achieved throughout the plant-lifecycle engineering (Plant-LCE), which is performed from research and development until to plant safety design, construction, and manufacturing (production and maintenance) stages. For systematic PSM, a model-based engineering framework is needed so that information can be used to inform all stages of the plant-lifecycle. Constantly updated and revised data and information must be shared at each engineering stage in a transparent way in order to examine the impacts of the safety decisions in all activities of the chemical process plant. The present paper reviews the existing studies on business process models, which have been developed for the process industrial activities, and introduces an integrated PSM framework which makes it possible to realize a consistent and collaborative PSM.

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Industrial control systems (ICS) have hidden vulnerabilities that cannot be usually solved by IT security tools, because of their 24 h 365 d non-stop, non-update and non-patch operation. There is, however, very limited report of cyber-attacks, so that owners of critical infrastructures do not have much attention for their ICS protection. This is a kind of misunderstanding of the current situation caused by a lacking of capability to detect a cyber-intrusion. In order to apply an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), it is difficult to make the complete white list of communication packets, and it is also difficult to perform anomaly detection by checking the payload of packet one by one. This paper defines characteristics of communication in the ICS network and proposes a methodology to visualize the ICS network behavior. An illustrative example of pseudo cyber-attack is also prepared for understanding our proposed method.

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Process safety incidents are directly caused by defects of protection layers, and process safety management (PSM) system maintains the soundness of the protection layers. In general, it is said that the weakness in the PSM system is identified from the incident cases, and the performance of the PSM is improve by the PDCA cycle using process safety metrics. However, the PSM business process is comprehended in the plant lifecycle engineering business process, so that even if the weakness of the PSM system is identified, the key engineering business process for the weakness and metrics cannot be recognized, so far. To overcome the above-mentioned problem in process safety metrics, we propose a business process model based process safety incident investigation for process safety metrics.

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The oil and gas industry in China has deployed risk management technologies for many years, including Layer Of Protection Analysis (LOPA), Alarm System Management (ASM) and Safety Instrumented System (SIS). These technologies, as well as their resulting risk treatments, consolidate the elements of the PSM system. However, to make the risk evaluation and following treatment possible, the determined scenario will be compared to some specified Risk Tolerable Criteria (RTC) in the risk management process of all of these technologies. By using the individual RTC mandated by Chinese Regulation Code No. 40 of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) of China as a starting point, a new and structural procedure to develop Scenario oriented Individual RTC (SIRTC) is proposed. This procedure firstly decomposes the total RTC of a facility into specified process unit, and then continues onto a specified scenario level with the conception of residual risk under the LOPA framework. In this manner, it can avoid the common mismatch in risk comparison, as well as the inconsistency caused by empirical apportioning methods. The case study of a natural gas compression station is provided to illustrate the proposed approach and concerned numerical results are presented.

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A plant alarm system is one of the most important elements of the third layer of independent protection layers (IPLs). Management of the plant alarm system has become identified as one of the key issues because of the disasters caused by alarm floods. The instrumentation, systems, and automation society has proposed an alarm management standard. However, an explicit definition of a business process to properly manage the plant alarm system has not been proposed. A plant alarm system is not always designed using the overall information about the plant, because the concreteness and quantity of the information varies along with the stages of the plant design. The requirements for a safety instrumented system may not be satisfied if the design of the plant alarm system was started after all of the stages of the plant design had been completed. The stages of the plant alarm system design should be carried out concurrently with the stages of the plant design. Therefore, the design process of the plant alarm system should be clarified corresponding to the available information at each stage of the design. To clarify the business process concerned with the plant alarm system, a framework is necessary to express the activities with tools, available information and output. Therefore, a business process model (BPM) as the framework for the plant alarm system will be developed. In this paper, we try to express a BPM concerned with a plant alarm system. Even if the developed BPM is incomplete, the BPM approach will have following merits: design rationale for the plant alarm system can be specified and stored, and the plant alarm system can be designed more logically. The stored design rationale and the logically designed plant alarm system are very useful for management of the change of the plant alarm system and ensuring consistency with other safety instruments.

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Since buried locations of fuel oil and natural gas are moving much farther from land areas, methods for excavating and transporting energy are needed in the energy market. Thus, one of the alternative methods, Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO), is under development recently for transporting and supplying the energy from deep sea areas. Among those platforms, LNG-FPSO for the excavation of LNG will play a leading role in satisfying the demands of LNG in the near future. Because the LNG-FPSO is designed to handle all processing activities on a ship, many facilities and modules are installed next to other’s equipment closely in a compact area. Thus, a single event on an offshore plant may lead to a complete disaster for the entire facility, called domino effects. This research suggests the selection method of the optimal layout for preventing domino effects by using a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model as a mathematical approach. Also, weight balance for stability, which is an important issues in offshore platforms, is considered in the layout problem. The suggested method can secure the safety in the multi-floor offshore process and reduce the effort to find the optimal layout.

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In long-distance pipelines, the Gas-Turbine-Driven Compressor Unit is the essential power equipment to ensure gas transmission smoothly. Therefore, reliability analysis must be carried out on a regular basis. However, thus far, an accepted analysis system has not been established concerning the Gas-Turbine-Driven Compressor Unit, and a complex system could not be analyzed through the existing methods. Therefore, the present paper proposes a reliability analysis method based on Multilevel Flow Model (MFM-RA). MFM-RA not only clearly reveals a research object’s goals, functions, components and interactive relations, but also is able to calculate the reliability index of the research object and each subsystem. The reliability analysis method, proven to be effective for mechanical systems with complexity, is applied to the lubricating oil system of the compressor unit.

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The technology of a company is represented by its technology standards, and their exhaustiveness and consistency are important for the competitiveness of the company. We had developed a systematized business process model for plant maintenance as the IDEF0 (Integration Definition for Function) activity model, and the requirements of technology standards had been defined. In this study, the framework to generate engineering standards is proposed. The requirements for engineering standards are analyzed on the basis of the developed business process model for maintenance, and two types of standards are found to be necessary for each required engineering standard. From the property of these standards, the IDEF0 activity model to generate engineering standards is developed.

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Typical FRP composites have a high chemical resistance and ease of construction, they have been widely used in chemical plants for applications such as chemical storage tanks. Accidental failures of a chemical tank roof were reported after the tank had been in service less than its expected lifetime. Therefore, comprehensive study of a composite material’s durability over a wide range of temperatures is proposed in this research. By using cyclic temperature of a solution condition, specimen is exposed into a chemical and the temperature is changed, a specimen in a liquid phase may change temperature along with the liquid; however, when a specimen is immersed in a vapor phase, the specimen may not change temperature with the vapor causing temperature difference and dew condensation inside of the material. After conducting bending tests of specimens at various immersion times under cyclic temperature of H₂SO₄ solution (nonvolatile acid), the strength of specimen in the vapor phase of H₂SO₄ showed a little bit lower than the specimen in the liquid phase, which contrasts with the results of specimen under isothermal condition that material strength in the liquid showed more damaged than in the vapor. Moreover, the H₂SO₄ concentration in the vapor is relatively low and the strength is in good agreement with the previous study using pure water under cyclic temperature of solution condition. This evident indicate the impact of the dew condensation on the strength which take place during temperature change. The cross-section of the specimen immersed in the vapor phase under cyclic solution temperature was chosen at the location, where microvoids are found. In general, cracks can easily initiate from microvoids that significantly affect the strength of the specimen. This experimental study is aimed to explain the mechanism of the roof failure and make a recommendation for the new design of FRP chemical tank.

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Process systems in petroleum industries such as oil refining systems have been becoming increasingly large and automatic. There can be strong interdependencies between various facilities and components. To reduce the probability and mitigate consequences of equipment failures, these interdependencies have to be assessed. The objective of this paper is to present a systematic modeling method for representing the interdependencies of process infrastructures in petroleum industries, as part of the risk early warning system. The proposed systematic modeling method involves several modeling steps. Firstly, Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) is used to represent a system in terms of goals, objectives, functions and components, each of which can be described at different levels of part-whole decomposition. Secondly, HAZOP study is carried out based on the MFM, by which all of the possible deviations and their corresponding potential fault causes and consequences are analyzed carefully. Thirdly, dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) is used to build the fault causal relationships that represent the fault interdependencies in the complex system. Finally, by the inference mechanism of DBN, the most possible initial reason(s) happened in the fault interdependency network with multi-reasons and consequences can be found accurately for risk early warning. Examples from a case study are included to illustrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach.

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In process industry, there are uncertainties associated with each variable, which might lead to process deviations and hazards. In order to accurately quantify the risks associated with these hazard scenarios, quantitative probability should be calculated. The process dynamically changes during plant operation, which requires continuous monitoring of process risks and real-time safety verification. It is challenging to both dynamically and instantaneously estimate the risks for all faults and deviations. An FSN is introduced in this paper to systematically and continuously estimate risks for all possible fault propagation scenarios. Intelligent reasoning algorithms are proposed using a BBN to accurately estimate risks. An FSN is used to analyze causes and consequences of different faults using automated forward and backward propagation learning techniques. Real-time safety verification is applied to each fault propagation scenario. The TE process is used to illustrate the proposed real-time safety verification.

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The dynamic simulation method based on the first principle model is considered to be useful especially when revision of the operation and control on experiences of plant engineers during run of the distillation plant is risky due to unstable behavior, use of unstable substances, complicated structure of the plant and so on. However, in the case of application of a conventional mirror modeling method in the Mirror Plant where the tray efficiency is constant, the simulated temperatures before revising the control method are seen not to agree well with the observed plant data. We propose use of vapor temperatures for estimation of vaporization efficiency for the equilibrium stage models by using the mirror modeling method in the Mirror Plant, which composes three system modes. In the case of adopting a time-variant model for the efficiency, the simulated temperatures before revising the control method are seen to agree well with the observed ones. Then, it was simulated using the correlation model between vaporization efficiency and vapor temperature adjusted for conventional control method whereby the periodical fluctuation can be stabilized after switching to the revised control method. Thus, the revised control method is implemented in the Distributed Control System, and it is observed that fluctuation of the vapor temperature became remarkably small. An application method of the vaporization efficiency based on temperature data is shown by dynamic simulation of remarkable periodical fluctuation of temperatures in a distillation column. Hence, it is made clear that the above-mentioned methodology for mirror modeling is useful and valuable for an improvement and verification of control loops for more stable operation of a plant.

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The thermal decomposition of ammonium nitrate (AN), activated carbon (AC), and potassium chloride (KCl) mixtures are investigated. The thermal properties were studied using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and the evolved gas was analyzed using thermogravimetry with mass spectroscopy (TG-DTA-MS). The time to maximum rate (TMRad) was then calculated using commercial thermal analysis software. DSC measurements of an AN/KCl mixture in a sealed sample pan showed a sharp exothermic decomposition and lower onset temperature than pure AN, whereas AN/KCl in an open pan exhibited an endothermic reaction. A mixture of AN/AC/KCl exhibited a lower onset temperature than both AN/AC and AN/KCl. TG-DTA-MS results revealed HCl gas was evolved from AN/KCl, which indicated the reaction of KCl with HNO₃ dissociated from AN to form HCl, and the subsequent destabilization of AN and AN/AC by HCl. TMRad calculations showed that AN/KCl underwent a run-away reaction within one day under closed adiabatic conditions above 180°C.

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Nowadays, spontaneous ignition of metal powders causes serious accidents in the metal powder industry. It is known that the ignition is caused by heat accumulation. Therefore, it is important to find the cause of heat accumulation of metal powder to prevent such accidents. In this study, the heat generation and heat accumulation of the chemical and/or physical reaction of metal powders with water were evaluated using the three calorimeters SuperCRC, ARC, and DSC. The correlation between the storage scale and the critical temperature of thermal runaway of the reaction was also evaluated using the Frank–Kamenetskii model. According to the results of these experiments and the use of the Frank–Kamenetskii model, thermal runaway appears to be caused by the heat of the chemical and/or physical reaction of the metal powder with water. This suggests that the chemical and/or physical reaction of metal powders with water is one of the causes of spontaneous ignition.

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In accidental gas explosions, blast waves propagate toward the surroundings after the bursting of the vessel or building, in which gas explosions occur. The strength of the blast wave depends not only on explosion behavior, but also bursting strength. This phenomenon has not been thoroughly examined. In the present experimental study, blast waves from hydrogen–air deflagrations in plastic vessels with various strengths were measured and flame behavior was recorded by digital high-speed video cameras. The measured peak overpressure and impulse of blast waves were compared with those of blast waves from unconfined gas explosions. Furthermore, these were compared with the calculated values of blast waves from bursting vessels without combustion reaction. Peak overpressure appeared when the vessels burst. The peak overpressure and impulse depended on the strengths of vessels, and were larger than those from unconfined gas explosions and bursting vessels without combustion reaction.

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