CHEMICAL ENGINEERING TRANSACTIONS VOL. 62, 2017 A publication of The Italian Association of Chemical Engineering Online at www.aidic.it/cet Guest Editors: Fei Song, Haibo Wang, Fang He Copyright © 2017, AIDIC Servizi S.r.l. ISBN 978-88-95608- 60-0; ISSN 2283-9216 Chemical Safety Risk Evaluation and Early Warning Approaches Aili Wu, Weiwei Jiao Hebei Agricultural University, Baoding 071001, China 422914122@qq.com Today, China has witnessed a rapid development in the economy, which has seen an explosive growth of the chemical industry. In this context, the safety risk of greater hidden dangers ensues. This paper describes the definition and the classification of safety risks those chemical enterprises face now. There is a reasonable level-to-level management of the risk sources in the chemical enterprises, where the concept of appropriate risk capacity was also introduced. The dangerous substances are also accommodated to a controllable probability of risk occurrence by controlling the appropriate risk capacity of chemical enterprises. A diamond forewarning model for enterprises’ safety risk is thereby established. Not only that, the safety risk management case in a chemical enterprise is cited to prove how the model proposed here is feasible and will be available for risk management. 1. Introduction As the social technology advances at a full speed, China's chemical industry has also gradually evolved into a chemical industry park which integrates chemical production, product processing, reasonable storage, effective transport and proper handling. Those chemical enterprises are fundamental to the safety and security of chemical industry park due to their hazards of chemical substances and potential energy intensity (Zhang, Q. et al., 2016, Torres-Vega, JJ et al., 2014). Chemical enterprises should be ensured at a safety level. They should play a great effect on environmental protection while maintaining a high productivity as a major growth pole of the national economy, thus contributing much to the harmonized and sustainable development of economic production and nature world (Fabbri and Contini, 2009). It is certain that the assessment and early warning of the safety risks in the chemical industry has a positive significance to answer for the steady development of economy, people's life safety and the harmonious development of the ecological environment (Fraaije et al., 2012). In recent years, the explosive growth of chemical industry has seen great safety hazards (Moore et al., 2007). Since 2008, the number of sudden environmental incidents in China has been increasing year by year. In response to this situation, the country has enacted relevant policies, and put teeth in three measures of “total reduction, safety protection and improv quality” to guarantee the safety of chemical enterprises, and underlined the importance of advancing the whole process of environmental risk management (Lemley et al., 2010; Moore, 2006). Existing studies demonstrate that a reasonable safety risk assessment system and early warning approach have a significantly positive impact on the probability of sudden environmental accidents in chemical enterprises (Baesi et al., 2013). It is therefore of great practical significance to explore chemical safety risk assessment system and early warning approaches. 2. Safety risk assessment of chemical enterprises 2.1 Risk and safety risk The definition of risk focuses on the abruptness of an accident, i.e, on the premise of failure to anticipate the consequences of an incident, it refers to the set of emergencies and their relevant consequences (Coulibaly et al., 2017; Barlow et al., 2015). In the S.H.E management system, the risk is defined as the probability of occurrence of the emergency within a certain period of time and the severity of the ensuing consequences (Giannopoulos, G. et al., 2010). DOI: 10.3303/CET1762259 Please cite this article as: Aili Wu, Weiwei Jiao, 2017, Chemical safety risk evaluation and early warning approaches, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 62, 1549-1554 DOI:10.3303/CET1762259 1549 The safety risk for chemical enterprises attributes to sudden risk according to the risk classification. The reason is that such risk has a high hazard to the environment and human health, and is characterized by potentiality, concealment and long-standing impact (Godin et al., 2004). In other words, the safety risks of chemical enterprises are usually hidden for a certain time and will not emerge immediately. However, once outbreak, it will produce a violent impact on the human health and ecological environment (Bou-Diab and Fierz, 2002). The risk source of chemical enterprises is shown in Fig. 1. This paper defines the safety risk source of a chemical enterprise as a risk substance pertaining to production, consumption and discharge, and under a certain impact of factors, can lead the surrounding to producing a risk substance which can trigger unexpected accidents, as a tiny unit of safety risk. Figure 1: Safety risk source of the chemical enterprise 2.2 Safety risk evaluation of chemical enterprises For the safety risk assessment of chemical enterprises focuses on the violent and irreversible consequences caused by natural irreversibility or improper activities of mankind, which are propagated through the environment, and eventually undermine the ecological environment and human society to a certain extent, provided that the narrow sense of safety risk source limited above is underlaid. The safety risk assessment in chemical enterprise includes three parts, i.e. risk identification, risk assessment and safety risk decision, each of which can be further subdivided, as shown in Fig. 2. Figure 2: Safety risk assessment of chemical enterprise content 3 Construction of safety risk assessment model 3.1 Classification management of safety risk sources When the classification management of safety risk sources is carried out for chemical enterprises, along with the potential risks, dosages, storages and actual storage volumes which must be classified, great attention must be paid to the inherent causes why safety risks occur, such as risks of production plants, human factors, 1550 etc. The key to the classification management of safety risk sources lies in the investigation of the environmental risk sources, including hazardous substances, storage areas, production management and the surrounding ecology environment, in general and detailed ways. Among them, the hazardous substances shall be investigated in accordance with the relevant standards issued for substance hazards. As shown in Table 1, the surrounding environmental conditions as investigated mainly include the sensitive targets within 500 meters around the chemical enterprises such as residential areas, rivers, hospitals and natural ecology preservation areas, etc. After a reasonable classification of risk sources, different classes can be disposed separately. Table 1: Physical hazard criteria substance class Level Rats by oral mg/kg Rats by skin mg/kg The four - hour inhalation in mice Mg/L toxic substance 1 <5 <1 <0.01 2 5