The inherent safety indices are the widely accepted tool to assess the inherent safety level at the preliminary design stage. Numerous inherent safety indices have been designed to assess the failure potential of shell and tube heat exchanger but limited indices have a capability to measure the failure potential of the heat exchanger network at the preliminary design stage. Moreover, integration between process design stages with risk and consequence estimation is extremely important in order to design inherently safe process plants. However, the lack of formal integration between process design stages with risk and consequence estimation results in unproductive estimation of risk levels and consequence that occurs during a particular process route until the design is completed. Few studies on the integration of risk estimation with process design are available but a viable framework is yet to be reported. Hence, based on the highlighted issue, application of integrated Risk Estimation Tool (iRET) for explosion scenarios is proposed to study the failure potential assessment of heat exchanger network (HEN) at the preliminary design stag
