Improve safety of industrial processes using dynamic operator training simulators

With the increasing complexities and integration of chemical processes, ensuring safety is becoming more difficult and expensive for new and/or modified plants. This inevitably increases the risks of unacceptable environmental impact as well as cost of operation. This is especially true where there is no existing plant to train operators. It is now possible to use design information to build a dynamic operator training simulator (DOTS) which can be used to explore start-up, shutdown and emergency operations procedures, to experience various operations and to evaluate safety. This approach has proved very successful in achieving safe operation of a new MTBE process. The paper reports the experience of developing DOTS and using it to ensure safe operation.