Quantitative evaluation of the safety barriers to prevent fired domino effect

A simplified methodology was developed for the assessment of fire protection barriers and to support the Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) of industrial facilities. Given a generic fire scenario, the aim of the methodology was to evaluate the probability of fire damages on industrial equipment both considering the availability and effectiveness of the protective barriers. Fire protections for industrial equipment were first classified, and then literature reliability data were used to build a dataset of Probability of Failure on Demand (PFD) for each protection type. Next, the effectiveness was determined from specific studies and surveys available in the literature. For passive protections, the effectiveness evaluation was based on the protective barrier response to fire. A case study was presented and discussed in order to exemplify the methodology implementation and to show the potential application in simplified QRA studies.