Coupling of integral methods and CFD for modeling complex industrial accidents

Abstract

Safety enhancement of operations in the chemical and petrochemical industry requires for advances in the tools aimed at supporting risk estimation and evaluation. In conventional risk studies, consequence assessment is carried out through simplified tools and conservative assumptions, often resulting in overestimation of accident severity and worst-case scenarios. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) may overcome the limitation of simplified approaches supporting the study of the dynamic evolution of accidental scenarios and, eventually, the consequences analysis of major accidents. However, the complexity of the problem makes the simulations too computationally demanding; hence an interesting approach is to couple simplified tools based on integral models and CFD. This work is aimed at modeling a safety critical scenario, i.e. domino effect triggered by fire. An integral model is adopted to reproduce a large-scale pool fire, thus simulating the radiative heat received by an exposed pressurized vessel. The behavior of the latter is then modeled through CFD, to investigate the heat-up process and the consequent pressure build up. Potential benefits and limitations of coupling distributed and integral models to support consequence assessment studies are discussed

Safety and Security of Domino Effects in the Process Industry: The State of the Art

“…In recent years, more attention has been paid to advanced numerical methods such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and the Finite Element Method (FEM) due to their strengths in physical effect simulation. These advanced methods are considered to be a promising tool to support the assessment of complex accidental scenarios, such as three-dimensional pool fire and vapor cloud dispersion [51]. Landucci et al [50] modeled the failure of storage tanks exposed to fire using a commercial FEM code.…”

“…The results show that wind speed has a significant contribution to the behavior of a pool fire and its possible accompanying domino effects. Besides, ANSYS FLUENT was also used to model the heat transfer and pressure build-up in LPG vessels exposed to fires [51]. FLACS software developed by Gexcon AS was also be used to model flammable cloud dispersion and VCE explosion, supporting domino effect assessment [54].…”

A new approach to chemicals warehouse risk analysis using computational fluid dynamics simulation and fuzzy Bayesian network

“…One of the parts of risk assessment and modeling of accidents is numerical assessment of pool fire by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) ( Rum et al., 2018 ). There are several methods for estimating fire risk, reducing fire risk, and designing fire protection systems ( Fire, 2003 ).…”

A Tutorial on Fire Domino Effect Modeling Using Bayesian Networks

“…Numerical modeling of fire and explosion [11][12][13][14][15] have greatly improved the accuracy of calculated heat fluxes and respective failure probability of exposed units. The past numerical studies of domino effects, which have mostly been based on applications of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software such as Fire Dynamics Simulator are Modelling 2021, 2 241 computationally expensive and resource-demanding, limiting their applications only to very simple chemical facilities in terms of layout and variety of process units.…”