Risk Analysis for a Hydrogen Production Plant

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Journal Title

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School of Science | Master's thesis

Date

2025-02-04

Department

Major/Subject

Systems and Operations Research

Mcode

Degree programme

Master's Programme in Mathematics and Operations Research

Language

en

Pages

77

Series

Abstract

The use of hydrogen is expected to increase in the near future, especially in high-emission sectors, to help slow down global warming. As the use of hydrogen expands, the hazards posed by the properties of hydrogen are highlighted. The data from hydrogen infrastructure is quite limited as no extensive failure history collection has been done. However, in order to minimize the risks involved with the process, a sufficient risk analysis should be performed. This thesis will examine risk analysis methods which can be used to perform a risk analysis for a new hydrogen production plant. The focus will be on comparing qualitative and quantitative risk analysis methods, for which an example of a quantitative risk assessment will be demonstrated for a small part of a hydrogen production plant. The quantitative assessment will be compared to a semi-quantitative assessment that was done outside of the thesis by using hazard and operability study and layer of protection analysis methods. The quantitative assessment will utilize fault and event tree analyses for examining the possible sequences of events. In addition, possible data sources and human reliability assessment will be utilized to provide reliability data for determining the frequencies of identified consequences. As further discussed in the thesis, both semi-quantitative and quantitative assessments have their shortcomings and benefits. Neither method clearly outperforms the other. After the thesis, the quantitative assessment can be extended to cover the whole plant to gain a better understanding of its usefulness. Additionally, the conducted hazard and operability study can be used as a basis for identifying all hazards.

Description

Supervisor

Raivio, Tuomas

Thesis advisor

Siren, Sami
Durante, Davide

Keywords

Risk analysis, Fault tree analysis, Event tree analysis, Hydrogen, Quantitative risk analysis, Water electrolysis

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