Towards Safer and More Sustainable Suspension PVC Manufacturing: A NuDIST-Based Inherent Safety Assessment
- 1Nanomaterials and Computer Aided Process Engineering Research Group (NIPAC), Chemical Engineering Department, Universidad de Cartagena, Cartagena 130015, Colombia
- 2Institutos y Centros de Investigación, Universidad Cesar Vallejo, Trujillo 13001, Peru
Abstract
Poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) remains one of the most widely produced polymeric materials worldwide because of its extensive use in construction, packaging, medical devices, and other industrial applications. As PVC manufacturing is evolving toward more resource-efficient configurations, mass and energy integration and wastewater regeneration should be assessed together with process safety. This study applies the Numerical Descriptive Inherent Safety Technique (NuDIST), a continuous logistic function-based screening methodology, to an industrial-scale suspension PVC production process incorporating mass integration, energy integration, and wastewater regeneration under a zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD) approach. Chemical safety was evaluated through flammability, explosiveness, toxicity, and reactivity, whereas process safety considered temperature, pressure, heat of reaction, and the yield-based inventory proxy. The baseline assessment produced a Chemical Safety Total Score (CSTS) of 251.12 and a Process Safety Total Score (PSTS) of 21.20, giving an overall NuDIST score of 272.32. The chemical component accounts for approximately 92.2% of the total score. Under the adopted dataset, vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) supplies the maximum score for all four chemical parameters, while pressure is the largest process safety contribution. An illustrative one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis showed that a 10% reduction in maximum pressure decreases the total score to 270.21 and a 10% relative increase in yield decreases it to 268.35, whereas replacing the 1 ppm baseline VCM toxicity input with the 5 ppm 15 min regulatory short-term limit changes the total score by less than 0.01%. The results therefore identify VCM-related inherent hazards and process severity as the main priorities for subsequent inherently safer designs, while the NuDIST is interpreted as a screening tool rather than a probabilistic quantitative risk analysis.
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BibTeX
@article{bustamantemiranda2026towards,
title = {{Towards Safer and More Sustainable Suspension PVC Manufacturing: A NuDIST-Based Inherent Safety Assessment}},
author = {Arelmys Bustamante-Miranda and Segundo Rojas-Flores and Ángel Darío González-Delgado},
journal = {Polymers},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.3390/polym18202557},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/18/20/2557},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Towards Safer and More Sustainable Suspension PVC Manufacturing: A NuDIST-Based Inherent Safety Assessment
AU - Arelmys Bustamante-Miranda
AU - Segundo Rojas-Flores
AU - Ángel Darío González-Delgado
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
JO - Polymers
DO - 10.3390/polym18202557
UR - https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4360/18/20/2557
AB - Poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) remains one of the most widely produced polymeric materials worldwide because of its extensive use in construction, packaging, medical devices, and other industrial applications. As PVC manufacturing is evolving toward more resource-efficient configurations, mass and energy integration and wastewater regeneration should be assessed together with process safety. This study applies the Numerical Descriptive Inherent Safety Technique (NuDIST), a continuous logistic function-based screening methodology, to an industrial-scale suspension PVC production process incorporating mass integration, energy integration, and wastewater regeneration under a zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD) approach. Chemical safety was evaluated through flammability, explosiveness, toxicity, and reactivity, whereas process safety considered temperature, pressure, heat of reaction, and the yield-based inventory proxy. The baseline assessment produced a Chemical Safety Total Score (CSTS) of 251.12 and a Process Safety Total Score (PSTS) of 21.20, giving an overall NuDIST score of 272.32. The chemical component accounts for approximately 92.2% of the total score. Under the adopted dataset, vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) supplies the maximum score for all four chemical parameters, while pressure is the largest process safety contribution. An illustrative one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis showed that a 10% reduction in maximum pressure decreases the total score to 270.21 and a 10% relative increase in yield decreases it to 268.35, whereas replacing the 1 ppm baseline VCM toxicity input with the 5 ppm 15 min regulatory short-term limit changes the total score by less than 0.01%. The results therefore identify VCM-related inherent hazards and process severity as the main priorities for subsequent inherently safer designs, while the NuDIST is interpreted as a screening tool rather than a probabilistic quantitative risk analysis.
SN - 2073-4360
ER -