Dynamic Simulation of disturbances in a typical biogas production plant

Biogas is the most emerging industrial sector for energy production from renewable sources at National and European level. Biogas industry is rapidly developing and in the recent years, several major accidents related to its supply chain happened. These accidents pointed out the need to perform a detailed process safety analysis. Hazards and operability analysis (HazOp) is one of the most used and highly efficient technique, for the identification of potential problems, but the main limitation with this technique is a qualitative nature of the results. Dynamice simulation as a powerful and versatile engineering tool has been adopted in process engineering and also for safety examination in chemical and biochemical process for decades, and it has created possibilities to eliminate or reduce the disadvantages and limitation of conventional process hazard analysis techniques, such as HazOp analysis. The innovation brought by this study, regards mainly to override this limitation by supporting the HazOp analysis using dynamic simulator, by simulating the disturbances and operational failure in a typical biogas production plant, which would help the quantification of HazOp, and improvement of process safety and reliability.