Efficient water deluge nozzles arrangement on offshore installations for the suppression of pool fires

Abstract

Offshore installations that handle hydrocarbons are in serious danger of fires and/or explosions. Pool fires are a significant risk related to major fire accidents, and active protection systems such as water deluge systems are used to reduce the consequences of high temperature and radiation resulting from pool fires. Thus, it is important to decide on the locations of water deluge nozzles for effective fire suppression, and the aim of this study is to introduce an efficient methodology for selecting the locations of water deluge nozzles. The locations of water deluge nozzles are selected using a proposed water deluge location index based on the characteristics of pool fires. The methodology is based on probabilistic approaches associated with credible scenarios representing possible events on offshore topside structures. This methodology, applied to examples, is used to determine the efficient arrangement of water deluge nozzles on a hypothetical FLNG topside structure. The effectiveness of the new methodology is verified through comparison with uniformly distributed nozzles using a computational fluid dynamics simulation. Keywords: Offshore installations; pool fire; location of water deluge nozzles; water deluge location index.

The Effect of Inclined Conditions on the Consequences of Fires Caused by Spilled Flammable Liquids: Development of Inclined Spreading Extent Formulae

“…Methods for determining fire loads on ships and offshore structures have been actively investigated [3][4][5][6][7], along with the responses of structures exposed to fire loads [8][9][10] and efficient fire suppression system design principles [11]. Additionally, although large spaces have been studied [12][13][14], previous studies did not consider pool spread characteristics under ship motion.…”

Analysis of effectiveness of fire safety in machinery spaces

“…While this wider safety research does not directly relate to fire safety in machinery spaces, its application may provide holistic improvements in fire safety in ships, which would ultimately include the machinery spaces. This systematic approach to accident prevention is not at the expense of analysis of individual features of fire prevention however and can be noted in the literature covering human and organisational factors, historical causal factors of fires in maritime transportation, calculation of fire probability (25)(26)(27), along with fire impact analysis research focusing on mitigating the outbreak of fire (28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41).…”