In the chemical industry, safe operations and environmental protection have always been core priorities for companies. Any safety incident not only causes devastating economic losses to the company, but also potentially leads to irreparable casualties and causes long-term and severe damage to the surrounding ecological environment. However, some chemical companies still fail to fully understand the critical importance of gas safety management, or their frontline employees lack the necessary knowledge of gas safety precautions. This creates hidden dangers for their production safety.
The Serious Hazards of Chemical Gas Safety Accidents
When gas-related fires and explosions occur in chemical plants, they often exhibit significant characteristics such as strong impact, widespread damage, rapid fire spread, the release of toxic gases, and the high risk of casualties. Therefore, effectively preventing such accidents has become a core focus of gas safety management in chemical plants. Chemical plants typically store large quantities of flammable and explosive hazardous chemicals, which pose significant safety risks in every stage of production, processing, storage, use, and transportation. If companies fail to properly manage safety risks, oversights can easily lead to serious safety accidents resulting in large-scale casualties.
Common Gas Safety Hazards in Chemical Plants
01 Combustible Gas Safety Hazards
Chemical production areas store large quantities of flammable raw materials, reaction intermediates, and finished products. These substances are inherently flammable, explosive, and toxic. Furthermore, various flammable gases are inevitably generated during the production process. Once these flammable gases leak and accumulate in the production area and surrounding environment, reaching a certain concentration, they are highly likely to cause serious safety accidents such as fires and explosions.
Common scenarios for flammable gas leaks include:
– Failure of dynamic and static seals in production equipment, leading to gas leaks
– Corrosion damage to equipment and connecting pipes, leading to gas leakage
– Water seals lose their sealing function due to water outages or failure to refill water promptly, causing gas escape
– Valves on equipment and pipelines break due to defects or external forces, causing gas leaks
02 Toxic Gas Safety Hazards
Many raw materials used by chemical companies are toxic or corrosive. If workers accidentally come into contact with these toxic substances or inhale the gases produced by their volatilization during work, they may experience varying degrees of poisoning symptoms and physical damage. In severe cases, burns, coma, and even life-threatening conditions may occur. Furthermore, in hot weather, the volatilization rate of toxic and hazardous substances is significantly accelerated, and the toxic gases produced by volatilization can penetrate the body through pores, further increasing the risk of poisoning.
03 Oxygen Safety Hazards
Low oxygen levels in the air can have adverse effects on human health. When oxygen concentrations drop below a certain level, they can even cause death. Conversely, high oxygen levels in combustible gases or flammable liquid vapors can significantly increase the probability of explosions. Therefore, strict oxygen level monitoring is essential in the following two situations:
In factory production environments, the proper installation of gas detectors is crucial for ensuring production safety and preventing disasters and accidents. Gas detectors are essential in the following three scenarios:
■ Online Monitoring of Process Gases
Most industrial production processes rely on the presence of various gases. For example, the steel and smelting industries generate various gases during production. Coal pulverized coal silos in the cement industry can accumulate carbon monoxide. Chemical and pharmaceutical industries contain specific process gases in reaction vessels such as hydrogenation reactors and centrifuges. Failure to monitor oxygen content in these processes in real time can easily lead to fires and, in severe cases, explosions. Therefore, 24-hour online continuous monitoring of oxygen content or combustible gas concentrations in production processes is essential.
■ Hazardous Gas Leak Detection
Most gases are colorless and transparent. When a leak occurs in a pipeline carrying hazardous gases, manual inspections alone are difficult to detect, posing a significant safety hazard to factory operations. Installing gas detectors at key locations, such as gas pipeline joints and low-lying areas where gas is likely to accumulate, can detect anomalies immediately and issue an alarm. Alternatively, they can trigger emergency control measures via signal transmission to related equipment, thereby preventing the escalation of the incident.
■ Gas Detection During Confined Space Operations
Confined spaces (confined spaces) are typically small and poorly ventilated, hindering gas diffusion and allowing toxic and hazardous gases to accumulate, significantly increasing the risk of accidents for workers. Poisoning, asphyxiation, and explosions are the most common types of accidents during confined space operations. Therefore, when working in confined spaces, workers must carry portable gas detectors to monitor the oxygen content and concentrations of toxic gases such as hydrogen sulfide in real time to effectively prevent accidents such as asphyxiation and poisoning.
Gas Monitoring and Alarm System
Installing accurate and reliable gas detectors is the first line of defense against gas safety issues. Chicheng Electric’s chemical industry gas monitoring system, consisting of an environmental equipment monitoring system, a data transmission system, and a data monitoring system, is integrated, multifunctional, explosion-proof, and flame-resistant. It supports real-time monitoring of dozens of gases, including ozone, hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), nitric oxide (NO), flue gas, and ammonia (NH3), in industrial sites such as chemical plants, petrochemical enterprises, automobile factories, and industrial parks.
Gas sensors convert the concentration of toxic and harmful gas leaks in the environment into digital signals and transmit them to a controller, which then displays the measured gas concentration. When the preset value is reached, the controller generates an audible and visual alarm signal and transmits the signal to a computer terminal.
Smart Chemical Monitoring Platform
Chicheng Electric combines traditional hardware with next-generation information technologies such as the Internet of Things, mobile internet, big data, and cloud computing, tailored to the specific needs of enterprises, to develop a smart chemical monitoring platform. Chicheng Electric’s intelligent chemical monitoring platform builds a secure, stable, and reliable data communication network through comprehensive monitoring of chemical parks. Factories can use the platform to create personalized, visual data dashboards, enabling remote monitoring, automatic alarms, online management, and data analysis of toxic, hazardous, and flammable gases within each monitoring station. This effectively strengthens safety management and response capabilities, ensuring production, environmental, and personnel safety.
