The two important hazards in the process plants are fire and explosion. Fire in the process industries causes more serious accidents than explosion or toxic release, though, accidents in which greatest loss of and damage occurs are generally caused by explosion. Chemical plants, steel plants, fertilizer plants, underground mining activities are some of the examples of industries which remain on hazardous conditions. The risk of fire and explosion can be greatly reduced by a meticulous analysis of these possibilities and adoption of relevant measures.
Environmental performance indicators are being increasingly important at industrial level. This is due, in part, to stockholders demanding environmental improvement and proof that these have been made. The need for an integrated frame work for environmental performance indicator is the call of the day. The indicators generally fall in four categories: the state of environment, corporate environmental policy, environment management system and the product and process of the company.
There is a need to integrate fire and hazard explosion which may degrade the environment. Environmental index can have different levels. Degradation from one level to another level may take place due to different types of hazards. The breakdown of the hazardous equipment would lead to emission of fire and explosion. These results in degradation of environment. The equipment failure is related with reduction in environmental index. Critical components are identified in each sub-system on the basis of failure record and maintenance history. The most common criteria used to rank the criticality of a component functional failure are related to their impacts on safety, availability and maintainability.
In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the situation for different types of fires and hazard affecting reliability of the system. The fire and hazard can be mitigated by properly analyzing the different situations. The reliability and availability of the system will increase. Thus gives rise to better environmental index.
