The propagation of faults in process plants: 5. Fault tree synthesis for a butane vaporiser system

An interactive, computer-based facility, FAULTFINDER, has been developed for fault tree synthesis. The modelling of fault propagation, fault tree synthesis, the interactive facility and its application to a pump changeover sequence have been described in four earlier papers. This paper describes the application of FAULTFINDER to the construction of a fault tree for a butane vaporising system. The results are compared with those achieved by the manual digraph method of fault tree construction. It is shown that FAULTFINDER is capable of generating logically consistent and structured trees for a process system comprising control and trip loops.