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Scenario · Process Operations

Respond to a reactor high temperature abnormal situation

You are the panel operator for the reactor building on Panel C during a simulator exercise.

Intermediate2 to 3 hours7 tasks
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The situation

What has happened

Reactor 2 is 40 minutes into the acid addition on a ferric chloride batch when the cooling water supply pressure starts to fall because a cooling tower pump has tripped. The reactor temperature, normally held at 85 degrees, begins to climb towards the safe operating limit of 95 degrees with a trip at 100. Scrubber pH is drifting down as off-gassing increases. Within a few minutes there are twelve alarms on the panel. Tahlia Brennan is in the field near the reactor building. Wayne Djakovic is on the phone to the terminal. The alarm response manual gives response times for each alarm and the abnormal situation procedure sets out when to hold, reduce and shut down. The exercise ends with a shift handover.

Your brief. Recognise and declare the abnormal situation, take the alarm response actions within the response times, protect the outside operator, decide when to activate the emergency shutdown, confirm the safe state, record the event as a process safety event and hand over the plant to the incoming shift.
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Tasks

Deliverables

  • Timeline of alarms, actions and decisions with times
  • Emergency shutdown decision record
  • Incident register entry as a process safety event
  • Completed shift handover report

Documents to use

Systems to use

Control Room Shift Log

Records every operating event, batch, reading, sample result, override and handover from the control room and the field for each shift.

Incident and Process Safety Event Register

Logs injuries, near misses, losses of containment, safety system activations, limit excursions and environmental events with tier, investigation and actions.

For trainers and assessors

Units of competency

Current on training.gov.au for the Chemical, Hydrocarbons and Refining as at 10 September 2026.

PMAOPS402Respond to abnormal process situations
PMAOPS311Operate and troubleshoot reactors and reaction equipment
PMAOPS348Operate safety, protection and shutdown systems
PMAOPS236Monitor continuous process plant
PMAOMIR210Control evacuation to muster point

Qualifications

PMA30120Certificate III in Process Plant Operations
PMA40116Certificate IV in Process Plant Technology
Assessor notes

What to look for

Evidence guide

Look for the situation declared early, the outside operator protected before anything else, actions taken in the order and within the times in the alarm response manual, a shutdown decision that is made on the limit and the response time rather than delayed to save the batch, and a shutdown confirmed on the display and in the field. The event record and the handover must be complete and honest.

The student's evidence summary lists every record they created or changed in the systems named above, their notes and the tasks they ticked. Verify it against the deliverables and your own assessment tool.