Applications of CFD for Process Safety

Abstract

Nowadays, the statistical studies have revealed that major accidents (MA) are frequent in diverse industries, which has originated the development of strategies and normative focussed in foreseeing and preventing these. Thus, the process safety is in continuous improvement. The experimental studies in this field result in situations of high risks and are usually expensive. Therefore, the implementation of developments as the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques is now applied, and has proven to be advantageous. In this work, CFD models for pool and jet fires are presented, as these kinds of fires are usually involved in major accidents. The results of the CFD models show orders of magnitude and behaviors in good agreement with experimental observations found in literature. The outputs of the simulations showed values of around 500 and 1400 K for the pool fires; while the jet fires predictions were of temperatures around 500 and 1050 K. Furthermore, the information obtained by these models can be used in order to develop safety plans to diminish risks in the facilities designs, safe zones and emergency exit routes.