2025 Spring Meeting and 21st Global Congress on Process Safety

(20c) Critical Systems during the Energy Transition? Reliability Analysis of Pressure Relief Devices in Hydrogen Systems

Authors

Alejandro Jimenez - Presenter, Engineering Systems Inc.
Katrina Groth, University of Maryland
In recent years, the energy industry has been searching for a sustainable alternative that reduces the impact of operations on the planet and human beings while maintaining current energy consumption. Specifically, efforts have been directed toward improving process sustainability through technological advancements that seek to lower carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

One of the key alternatives that the industry has collectively focused on is the use of hydrogen as a medium for energy production and storage. However, hydrogen poses additional hazards, such as its higher flammability and the risk of hydrogen embrittlement, which have the potential to cause more frequent fires and explosions than currently observed.

Due to these new hazards, there is uncertainty regarding the risk present when traditional relief devices are applied in hydrogen systems. Furthermore, although these devices are intended to mitigate ruptures, incidents have been recorded where the relief device itself was the initiating event, raising questions about the current balance of risk.

To address this uncertainty, this presentation will showcase a reliability study of relief devices conducted in collaboration with the University of Maryland. This study identified the failure characteristics of the most commonly used relief devices and developed a probabilistic distribution of the most significant failure modes for risk.

The presentation will conclude with practical implications resulting from the developed probabilistic model, aimed at reducing the uncertainty of present risk in the application of relief devices in hydrogen systems. This approach seeks continuous improvement, avoiding an imbalance in risk, and ultimately aims for a safe transition to clean energy and a sustainable world.