A risk-based method for determining passive fire protection adequacy

A risk-based approach to determine the adequacy of designed safety barriers in process plants is proposed and implemented to an offshore gas production platform. The scheme employs quantitative risk assessment method to assess the impact of selected process hazards and the adequateness of safety barriers based on a selected ALARP threshold value. The results obtained are further verified using emergency evacuation response analysis. Evaluations carried out on the designed fire/blastwalls for the selected case study confirmed the suitability of the proposed method. ► Risk-based method to satisfy analysis-matching-the needs philosophy. ► Method to measure the adequacy of fire and explosion safety barriers. ► Case study involving offshore gas platform. ► Results conform to standards used and validated with other method.