Process Safety
Deepwater Horizon Blowout
T2 Laboratories
Discussion Questions
Watch both case-study videos first, then work these questions - commit to answers before discussing with a classmate or an AI tutor.
- T2 Laboratories was a thermal runaway: heat generation grows exponentially with temperature while heat removal grows roughly linearly. Sketch the two curves, mark the stable and unstable intersections, and explain what "the point of no return" means on your sketch.
- In both incidents, control systems and operators had warnings before the event. Why is a basic process control layer (this course's PID loops) not credited as a safety layer, and what makes an independent protection layer (relief device, interlock, emergency shutdown) different in kind?
- For Deepwater Horizon: identify one point where a measurement existed but its interpretation failed. What is the difference between having data and having an alarm/response design that acts on it?
- The same runaway physics now shows up in new places: lithium-ion battery packs in thermal runaway and hydrogen electrolyzers/storage handling a flammable gas. Pick one and map the T2 lessons onto it - what is the exotherm, what is the cooling path, and what independent layer stops the event when control fails?
"Quiz me with 4 questions, one at a time, on process safety for control engineers: the heat-generation vs heat-removal argument for reactor runaway and why stirring/cooling loss is catastrophic, layers of protection (control, alarms, interlocks, relief, containment) and why they must be independent, what a safety instrumented system does that a PID loop cannot, and one lesson each from T2 Laboratories and Deepwater Horizon. Grade my answers and list my misconceptions."
App: Reproduce a runaway safely in the Stirred Reactor Control Studio - push the exothermic CSTR with feed upsets until the 400 K alarm trips, and identify the last moment at which cooling could still have arrested the excursion.
