Abstract
The coal gasifier is the core unit of the coal gasification system. Due to its exposure to high temperatures, high pressures, and aggressive media, it is highly susceptible to serious accidents in the event of failure. Therefore, it is important for the gasifier to perform failure-risk assessment to understand its safety status and provide safety measures. Bayesian networks (BNs) for risk analysis of process systems has received a lot of attention due to its powerful inference capability and its ability to reflect complex relationships between risk factors. However, the acquisition of basic probability data in a Bayesian network is always a great challenge. In this study, an improved Bayesian network integrated with a trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy number-based similarity aggregation method (TpIFN-SAM) is proposed for the failure-risk assessment of process systems. This approach used the TpIFN-SAM to collect and aggregate experts’ opinions for obtaining the prior probabilities of the root events in the BN. In the TpIFN-SAM, the intuitionistic fuzzy analytic-hierarchy-process method (IF-AHP) was adopted to assign the expert weights for reducing subjectivity or the bias caused by individual differences. To clarify the suitability of the proposed method, a case study of a coal gasifier was demonstrated, and both prediction and diagnosis analyses of the BN were performed; finally, the weak links of the gasifier were identified.