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Assessment of Cooling Water and Spacing Sensitivities for Fire Propagation Prevention in Cylindrical Fuel Tank Farms

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Abstract

Failure and loss in hydrocarbon storage tanks lead to severe environmental and economic losses, reach hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as human casualties. These losses are magnified due to fire propagation between tanks caused by intense incident radiation on adjacent tanks that are exposed to the fire. Codes and standards recommendations regarding spacing between tanks and cooling water application rate are inconsistent and contradicting. According to the author review, scarce studies investigated circular pool fires and the accompanied thermal radiation on cylindrical surfaces on Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). This study numerically investigates the thermal radiation emitted from full surface circular pool fires on the adjacent cylindrical tanks surfaces on FDS. Additionally, the study analyzes the effect of different parameters such as fuel type, wind effect and spacing between tanks on fire propagation in hydrocarbon storage tanks. In addition, the effect of the cooling water application rate and its variation with the above parameters on prevention of fire propagation is investigated. The incident heat flux produced from using Heptane fuel was from 30 to 77% higher than that produced from using ethanol fuel. Increasing wind speed from zero to 3 m/s caused the incident heat flux to increase up to four times the initial value. Increasing the spacing between tanks from 0.5 to one time, the pool fire diameter caused more than 30% reduction in the incident heat flux on the target tank. Application of cooling water on the surface of the tanks exposed to fire showed significant reduction in incident heat flux while applying 2 Lit/min × m2 of cooling water, this reduction reached 50% in some cases . However, doubling the cooling water application rate to 4 Lit/min × m2 showed limited improvement in cooling rate, ranged between 5 and 15%. These findings are consistent with IP19 standard recommendations against other codes and standards.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Power Engineering, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

    Ahmed Saber, Mahmoud Abo El-Nasr & Amr Y. Elbanhawy

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  1. Ahmed Saber
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  2. Mahmoud Abo El-Nasr
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  3. Amr Y. Elbanhawy
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Correspondence to Ahmed Saber.

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Saber, A., Abo El-Nasr, M. & Elbanhawy, A.Y. Assessment of Cooling Water and Spacing Sensitivities for Fire Propagation Prevention in Cylindrical Fuel Tank Farms. J Fail. Anal. and Preven. 21, 1808–1820 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11668-021-01236-1

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