Technical diagnostics in accident risk assessment

Abstract

For a comprehensive assessment of safety of hazardous facilities, an accident risk ratio is used. Existing methodologies of risk assessment do not account for technical conditions of the facility and the degree of its defectiveness. This work demonstrates the possibility and necessity of a broader use of nondestructive testing (NDT) and technical diagnostics (TD) to estimate the probability of an accident, formulates the requirements for analyzing the risk, and establishes the line of development for these approaches. We consider the issues related to introducing new requirements for NDT and TD, which deal with representing the quantitative values of NDT, i.e., reliable data on the size of defects and measurement errors. We prove the necessity of using the methods of probabilistic fracture mechanics for assessing the real values of accident probability.