Natural hazards may rapidly lead to a massive domino chain in chemical industrial parks (CIPs). This work develops a high-efficiency and systematic analytical framework that is applicable to a broad range of uncertain and time-varying factors related to the evolution process of natural hazard-induced domino chain (NHDC). Specifically, the evolution mechanism of NHDC is revealed from a macro-systemic perspective. An event-driven disaster chain evolution system is developed, of which the system state transition is formulated by a Markov decision process and a temporal-difference learning algorithm. A system dynamic risk model is proposed to analyze the dynamic risk associated with NHDC. An earthquake-induced Na-tech scenario is adopted to demonstrate the methodology. Computational results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive in simulating large-scale system state transition spaces. The involvement of natural hazards would lead to a more complex and severe evolution pattern. Five distinctive stages of the whole NHDC were identified. We found that the value of system dynamic risk is likely to surge in the deterioration stage. Our methodology can dynamically identify the critical system temporal intervals and units at each evolution stage, which has the potential to support the prevention and mitigation of such catastrophic chain events.@en

Flood events impose great distress on chemical industrial areas, since they may cause Natech accidents involving multiple units. Furthermore, escalation vectors exerted by major accidents can trigger knock-on events, so-called domino effects, causing very severe consequences. In the present study, a methodology is proposed to include domino effects triggered by floods in a quantitative risk assessment, by addressing the frequency assessment of flood-induced domino scenarios. A comprehensive procedure is developed, combining the fragility model for unit damage due to floods, probability estimation for domino escalation, and combinatorial analysis for overall scenarios. Moreover, the flow interference due to the layout of chemical industrial areas is explored to calculate the damage probability more accurately. The methodology has been demonstrated by a case study, the changes in risk indexes and damage zones due to Natech domino effects are discussed. The results show that the overall risk significantly increases with respect to conventional scenarios when considering flood-induced Natech events and domino effects, evidencing the importance of risk analysis of Natech-related domino effects. Finally, some prevention measures have been proposed for chemical industrial areas to make them more resilient and safer when it comes to floods.

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The increasing demand for chemical products has driven the construction and development of chemical industrial areas, or so-called 'chemical industrial parks' (CIPs), but this has intrinsically raised the risk of major accidents. Therefore, it is significant and urgent to summarize the state of art and research needs in the field of CIP safety. In this paper, a keyword co-occurrence analysis of 116 scientific articles was conducted to support the classification of research topics in this field, then an overview of those research topics was presented to investigate the evolution of safety research with respect to CIPs. Specifically, the way that safety assessments are conducted, as well as how safety management and safety technology in such areas are classified and investigated, followed by detailed descriptions of representative methods and their contributions to CIP safety, are discussed. An integrated safety framework for CIPs is proposed to organize safety approaches and measures systematically. Based on the classification and analysis of studies on management, assessment, and technology related to CIP safety, the research trends and future directions and challenges are discussed and outlined. Those results are useful for improving theoretical method and industrial strategies, and can advance the safety and sustainability development of CIPs.

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Anaerobic digestion (AD) has been commercially operated worldwide in full scale as a resource recovery technology underpinning a circular economy. However, problems such as a long start-up time, or system instability, have been reported in response to operational shocks. These issues are usually linked to the dynamics of the functional microbiota in AD. Exploring the microbiota-functionality nexus (MFN) could be pivotal to understand the reasons behind these difficulties, and hence improving AD performance. Here we present a systematic MFN study based on 138 samples taken from 20 well-profiled lab-scale AD reactors operated for up to two years. All the reactors were operated in the same lab within the same period of time using the same methodology to harvest physio-chemical and molecular data, including key monitoring parameters, qPCR, and 16S sequencing results. The results showed a core bacterial microbiota prevailing in all reactor types, including Bacillus, Clostridium, Bacteroides, Eubacterium, Cytophaga, Anaerophaga, and Syntrophomonas, while various methanogens dominated different communities due to different inocula origins, reactor temperatures, or salinity levels. This core bacterial microbiota well correlated with biogas production (Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.481, p < 0.0001). Such strong correlation was even comparable to that between the biogas production and the methanogenic 16S rRNA gene content (Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.481, p < 0.0001). The results indicated that AD performance only modestly correlated with microbial diversity, a key governing factor. AD microbiota was neither functionally redundant nor plastic, and a high variety in communities can exhibit a strong difference in reactor performance. Our study demonstrates the importance of a core bacterial microbiota in AD and supports inspiring considerations for design, bioaugmentation, and operational strategies of AD reactors in the future.

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Along with the expansion of China's chemical industry, a series of catastrophic chemical accidents have occurred, often with severe human casualties, resulting in adverse effects on the sustainable development. In line with these developments, process safety research is also developing rapidly in China. This paper aims to present insights in the progress of process safety research in China using bibliometric analysis. The results indicate that in China the most productive authors, institutions, and provinces are located in economically developed coastal areas and in areas with more universities specializing in safety science and engineering. As for the international cooperation, the most significant collaborating countries are economically developed countries or China's neighbors, and these countries have published a large number of papers important in this field. The citation analysis shows that Chinese process safety research currently still has a relatively limited international impact. The analysis of hot topics shows that there currently are very few new methods or research topics introduced in recent years, and there is still significant room for the Chinese research community to improve in some subdomains of the research field. Based on these trends and apparent shortcomings in the literature, future research directions are proposed. The results contribute to understanding the overall situation of process safety research in China, and can serve as a high-level synthesis of the research field. This information is useful for developing research and development policies and industrial strategies, and benefits the safety and sustainability of China's chemical industries.

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Atmospheric storage tanks damaged by floods may lead to severe NaTech accident scenarios, and the vulnerability assessment of process equipment suffered by natural events is a crucial point in NaTech risk analysis. In the present study, limit state equations for failure modes of displacement and buckling are introduced based on load-resistance relationships. The parameterized fragility models that can be used in a wide variety of atmospheric unanchored storage tanks and floods have been developed based on logistic regression (LR), and moreover, the models are assessed and validated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and available accident data in literature. The effects of filling level and density of storaged liquid, the diameter and height of tank, and the inundation height and velocity of flood on the vulnerability of different failure modes are analyzed using fragility curves. Furthermore, fragility magic cubes are first proposed to obtain critical disaster conditions and critical filling levels in different cases. Finally, corresponding quantitative mitigation measures in different stages such as site selection, design, and operation are proposed based on the results of vulnerability assessment.

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Domino effects are typically high impact low probability (HILP) accidents, whereby escalation effects triggered by fires are most frequent. The evolution of fire-related domino effects depends on synergistic effects and the performance of safety barriers, but those factors usually are time-dependent. In the present study, a methodology is developed to provide more accurate probabilities related to domino effects, by considering the temporal evolution of escalation vectors caused by time-dependent factors. The Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) approach is applied both to model the spatial-temporal propagation pattern of domino effects and to estimate the dynamic probabilities of domino chains. The methodology is illustrated with a case study to determine the dynamic aspect of the probabilities of domino effects considering the impact of add-on (active and passive) safety barriers and taking into account synergistic effects. The critical units for facilitating domino propagation have been identified by the analysis of posterior probabilities, and further validated using graph theory. The methodology will be helpful for risk management and emergency decision-making of any chemical industrial area.

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Although there is a growing field of research focusing on university laboratory safety, accidents in such contexts still occur relatively frequently. Therefore, it is significant to summarize current research status and gaps, and to propose future research directions in the field of university laboratory safety. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis method was applied to gain an overall view of the developments, focus areas, and trends in this field of safety research. A total of 219 scientific publications on university laboratory safety were identified and screened from the database of Web of Science, covering 44 countries or regions, 254 research institutions, 575 authors, 126 publication sources, and 70 subject categories. Bibliometric data such as annual growth trend and distribution of subject categories were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. The most productive and influential countries, institutions, authors, and their cooperation networks were identified from co-citation maps created by VOSviewer. Further analysis was carried out to find out the core publications and publication sources in this field. Insights in the focus areas and research topics over time were obtained through terms co-occurrence analysis. The results indicate that university laboratory safety is a highly multidisciplinary research field. However, it is still a young discipline and belongs to the minority research field when compared with other safety domains. Several avenues for future research are identified to advance and make progress in this field.

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