Comparison of a Prescriptive and a Performance-Based Approach for Fire and Explosion Risk Assessment of Hydrogen Plant

For fire safety, new technologies come with a perception of risk. For hydrogen applications, it is important to refer to regulations and standards, e.g. NFPA 2 on Hydrogen Technologies Code [1]. Prescriptive-based provisions as a fixed set of rules in the standard are most often applied as they are easy to apply. It is important to understand that these standards also allow for performance-based provisions which lead to compliance with the goals and objectives of the standard. In this presentation we will explain the process and advantages of performing a risk-informed performance-based assessment [2] by:

1. Quantifying fire safety performance goals and objectives in a risk tolerance profile (both in fire event likelihoods and consequences) for property damage and business interruption.
2. Determine performance criteria in terms of the conditional probability of fire protection system success given a defined scenario, time-line, target threshold, damage limits and risk tolerance.
3. Verify the risk and safety levels of existing or proposed fire protection design options in a quantitative manner.

Both prescriptive and performance-based options will be applied on a case-study and the advantages of both will be presented. A practical tool will be presented to limit the time required for quality control and allow for a large number of scenarios to be analyzed in an automated way.

[1] NFPA 2 on Hydrogen Technologies Code, 2023

[2] Risk-informed, Performance-Based Industrial Fire Protection, Thomas F. Barry, 2002