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Risk assessment of occupational exposure to benzene using numerical simulation in a complex geometry of a reforming unit of petroleum refinery

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Abstract

There has been an increasing concern about the continuous and the sudden release of volatile organic pollutants from petroleum refineries and occupational and environmental exposures. Benzene is one of the most prevalent volatile compounds, and it has been addressed by many authors for its potential toxicity in occupational and environmental settings. Due to the complexities of sampling and analysis of benzene in routine and accidental situations, a reliable estimation of the benzene concentration in the outdoor setting of refinery using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) could be instrumental for risk assessment of occupational exposure. In the present work, a computational fluid dynamic model was applied for exposure risk assessment with consideration of benzene being released continuously from a reforming unit of a refinery. For simulation of benzene dispersion, GAMBIT, FLUENT, and CFD post software are used as preprocessing, processing, and post-processing, respectively. Computational fluid dynamic validation was carried out by comparing the computed data with the experimental measurements. Eventually, chronic daily intake and lifetime cancer risk for routine operations through the two seasons of a year are estimated through the simulation model. Root mean square errors are 0.19 and 0.17 for wind speed and concentration, respectively. Lifetime risk assessments of workers are 0.4–3.8 and 0.0096–0.25 per 1000 workers in stable and unstable atmospheric conditions, respectively. Exposure risk is unacceptable for the head of shift work, chief engineer, and general workers in 141 days (38.77%) in a year. The results of this study show that computational fluid dynamics is a useful tool for modeling of benzene exposure in a complex geometry and can be used to estimate lifetime risks of occupation groups in a refinery setting.

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  1. - Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU E5-2660 V2 at 2.20 GHz

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Acknowledgements

This study was conducted as a partial fulfillment of a Ph.D. thesis at the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, and the authors thank the university authorities for their financial and moral support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Health, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Majid Bayatian, Mohammad Javad Jafari & Yadollah Mehrabi

  2. Department of Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Environment, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Khosro Ashrafi

  3. Safety Promotion and Injury Prevention Research Center and School of Public Health, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Mansour Rezazadeh Azari

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  1. Majid Bayatian
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  2. Khosro Ashrafi
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  3. Mansour Rezazadeh Azari
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  5. Yadollah Mehrabi
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Correspondence to Khosro Ashrafi or Mansour Rezazadeh Azari.

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Bayatian, M., Ashrafi, K., Azari, M.R. et al. Risk assessment of occupational exposure to benzene using numerical simulation in a complex geometry of a reforming unit of petroleum refinery. Environ Sci Pollut Res 25, 11364–11375 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-1318-6

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