Expert System For Dust Explosion Prevention And Protection

Dust explosions occur in a variety of industries and have a recorded history stretching back over200years. Dust explosions always claim lives and cause huge financial losses. Dust explosion risk can be prevented by inherently safer design or mitigated by engineering protective system. Design of explosion prevention and protection needs comprehensive knowledge and data on the process, workshop, equipment, and combustible materials. The knowledge includes standards, expertise of experts, and practical experience. The database includes accidents, dust explosion characteristics, inherently safer design methods, and protective design methods. However, it is difficult for every equipment operator and technician to master the comprehensive professional knowledge and apply the knowledge to analyze and deal with the hazards because of the complexity of dust explosion influence factors and the prevention and protection measures. Therefore, development of an expert system for dust explosion prevention and protection using the existed expert knowledge, experience and problem-solving strategies instead of expertise of limited experts will reduce the hazards and losses dramatically.This ASP.NET application was developed with Visual Studio.Net as the integrated development environment (IDE), and using C#as the programming language. ADO.NET and WPF were used for database development and user interface development respectively. SQL Server2008was choosed as the database server.The developed system has the following functions:(1) Inquiry of knowledge and data for explosion prevention, such as dust explosion accidents and dust explosion characteristics.(2) Accident analysis.The analysis methods of fault tree, event tree and bow-tie diagram were used to find potential risk factors and the ralationship between the factors for dust explosion prevention and protection system.(3) Risk assessment.The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used for risk assessment of dust explosion prevention and protection.(4) Recommendation of prevention and protection solution. An inference engine and an interpreter with similar functions of Prolog language were developed using C#language, which can realize the function of inference and provide recommendations for explosion prevention and protection.(5) Computer aided design for explosion venting. Function to calculate the vent area of vessels, silos and buildings was provided.(6) Computer aided design for pressure resistant. The system provided the caululation of the minimum required thickness and the maximum allowance working pressure of typical elements, such as cylindrical shells, spherical shells, ellipsoidal heads, torispherical heads and conical heads or shell segment. It also provided verification function of mechanical design strength for existing equipment.Through the development and test of the expert system, the following conclusions were drawn:(1) The software developed using ASP.Net based on Browser/Server architecture has the advantages of easiness to be released, updataed and applied, compared to desktop applocations.(2) Tree diagram data structure and related algorithms can realize risk analysis methods sush as fault tree, even tree and bow-tie diagram in computer software.(3) Prolog language has advantages for knowledge management of explosion prevention and protection. The development of the inference engine and interpreter similar to Prolog can realize the seamless integration of the inference engine and the user interface using C#, which make it more convenient to build and to apply the knowledge base.(4) The developedexpert system for dust explosion prevention and protection can preliminarily realize the functions of inquiry of knowledge and data, accident analysis, risk assessment and solution recommendation for explosion prevention and protection, which meets the expected requirements.