The course deals with the risk assessment of technical systems, a tool to guarantee safety for personnel and population, environment and asset protection against daily and major accidents, both for geoenergy installations and mining installations. Risk assessment is a common tool to approach and optimise safe design and safe operations in geonenergy and mining activities supporting the methods and practices provided by the other courses of the Master programme. The contents of this course are preliminary for the course Planning of Sustainable Mining/Occupational Safety Engineering of the Sustainable Mining track.

Basically, at the end of the course students will be able to manage properly concepts such as safety, hazard, risk and to approach their future daily professional choices using a risk based approach. From a technical point of view, they will be able to organise a risk assessment for a complex technical system (geoenergy process systems or mining installations) using the tools presented in this course and collecting their knowledge resulting from previous courses: • comprehension of a technical system starting from description and drawings; • understanding of the regulation concerning occupational safety, process safety, safety of machines; • identification of the related hazards; • selection of the potential accidental sequences; • estimation of accident/failure probabilities by RAM (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability) analyses; • estimation of damage extension in case of major accident, by simplified methods; • identification of the preventive and mitigation measures for risk control; • specific safety issues for geoenergy process systems and mining applications; The application of these concepts and tools to a real study case will be performed during practical lectures by team working; two different subject will be investigated: a portion of a process plant for geoenergy students and a mine installation, for mining students. These project works are set in order to train students in the typical approach adopted for professional risk analysis, where several specialists contribute for a common goal, by a multidisciplinary investigation.

Fundamentals on physics, chemistry, thermodynamics and fluid mechanics; fundamentals on process installations and mining systems and operations.

1. The Risk concept: definition, assessment, perception and tolerability. 2. Role of Risk in the International Legislation and technical Standards with a special focus on process safety, occupational safety and safety of machineries. 3. Methodologies for the risk assessment: * Elements on the Boolean algebra and probability theory, * Hazard identification, * Methodologies for the reliability assessment of complex systems, * Methodologies for the study of accidental sequences, * Qualitative and Quantitative Risk Assessment, * Risk Assessment and tolerability criteria, *The role of risk assessment in the international legislation. 4. Insights on the reliability theory and RAM (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability) analyses: * RAM characterisation of elementary components, * Reliability Data Banks, * Calculation of unreliability and unavailability for complex systems/machineries, * Common Cause Failures and Criticality Indexes, * Elements of Functional Safety. 5. Process Safety: * Description and modelling of accidental phenomena (loss of containment, fires, explosions, gas dispersion), * Vulnerability analysis, * Emergency planning and management. 6. Machine Safety: * Investigation of typical hazards (HAZID methodology and statistical investigation), * Verification of safety for machines by RAMS studies, * Identification of preventive and protection risk control measures.

The main part of the course consists in the presentation, by the teacher, of the context of safety and risk assessment, the relevant regulation and the professional methodologies and tools to perform this type of analyses. A part of the course will be spent for practical application of risk analysis (Project Work). Students, split in two parallel classes (one for geoenergy students and the second for mining students), have to apply the contents of the lectures to perform a safety assessment of a part of a real geoenergy installations or mining system. They have to prepare, by team working, a report describing the analysis performed and a critical discussion of the results obtained.

Lecture notes prepared by the teacher; material can be downloaded by the POLITO Didactic Portal. Other books suggested for personal deepening: ' F.P. Lees, Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Elsevier, 1996; ' AIChE /CCPS, Guidelines for Quantitative Risk Analysis, 2000; ' Vinnem, Quantified Risk Assessment for Offshore Petroleum Installations, NTNU Trondheim Norway, 1997; ' NUREG, PRA Procedures Guide, CR2300, 1983; ' Mc Cormick, Reliability and Risk Analysis, Academic Press, 1981; ' Kletz, HAZOP & HAZAN, Inst. Chem. Eng., 1986; ' TNO, Methods for the Calculation of Physical Effects (Yellow Boook), 1997; ' TNO, Methods for the determination of possible damage, (Green Boook), 1989.

Slides; Dispense; Esercizi; Esercizi risolti;

Modalità di esame: Prova scritta (in aula); Elaborato scritto prodotto in gruppo;

Exam: Written test; Group essay;

... The final exam consists in: ' a written session based on questions and exercises, where each student has 1.5 hours to demonstrate its comprehension on concepts and methods presented during the theoretical lectures (max 26 points over 30); students can use their own books, slides or notes during the test. Any communication with other people, except the teacher, is forbidden ' the evaluation, by the Teacher, of the Project Work done by the students during practical lectures (max 5 points over 30); evaluation will take into account the participation of students to the practical lectures, the contents and results of the project work and finally the quality of the final report. The Project Work must be delivered at the end of the course to the teacher in pdf format (one file only). One delivery for each team is sufficient.

Gli studenti e le studentesse con disabilità o con Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (DSA), oltre alla segnalazione tramite procedura informatizzata, sono invitati a comunicare anche direttamente al/la docente titolare dell'insegnamento, con un preavviso non inferiore ad una settimana dall'avvio della sessione d'esame, gli strumenti compensativi concordati con l'Unità Special Needs, al fine di permettere al/la docente la declinazione più idonea in riferimento alla specifica tipologia di esame.