Fire Protection of Steel Structures of Oil and Gas Facilities: Multilayer, Removable, Non-Combustible Covers

Abstract

Fire protection is required to protect metal structures of oil and gas facilities from fires. Such fire protection should provide high fire resistance limits: 60, 90, 120 and more minutes. Specialists of LLC “RPC PROMIZOL ” developed a multilayer, removable type of fire protection made of superfine basalt fibre and ceramic materials for operation in Arctic conditions. Five experimental studies were carried out in standard and hydrocarbon fire regimes. The fire protection effectiveness of the products for I20 beams without load was obtained: a 50 mm thick coating provided 130 min of a standard fire regime; a 15 mm thick coating provided 60 min. The 15 mm thick coating provided 30 min of a hydrocarbon fire regime and the 50 mm thick coating provided 93 min of a hydrocarbon fire regime. The I40 beam under a load of 19.9 tf showed an R243 for the standard fire regime. The coefficients of effective thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of fire-retardant compositions were determined by solving the inverse heat conduction problem. The problem was solved by modelling using the QuickField 7.0 software package, which implements FEM. Modelling showed that for obtaining the fire resistance limit R120 under the standard fire regime for the sample steel structure from an I40 beam, it is enough to apply fire protection with a thickness of 25 mm instead of 50 mm, which agrees with the experimental data. For the hydrocarbon regime, it is predicted that R120 can be obtained at a thickness of 45 mm instead of 50 mm.

Oil and Gas Structures: Forecasting the Fire Resistance of Steel Structures with Fire Protection under Hydrocarbon Fire Conditions

“…The QuickField, Tera Analysis Ltd., Denmark, (in another version, ELCUT, LLC Tor, Russia) software was used to build thermodynamical finite element models, taking into account heat sources in blocks, edges, or individual vertices of the model [42]. QuickField packages can be applied to various aspects of thermal model design-heat transfer, temperature distribution, evaluation of local overheating, transient heating processes-and to solve thermophysical problems with the purpose of verifying experimental data [38][39][40][41].…”

“…Test conditions and procedures were applied to column specimens of different crosssections with fire protection according to [18] (Figure 5). Experimental studies for epoxy paints, plaster compositions, non-combustible covers PROMIZOL MIX PROPLATE and cement boards are presented in [31,[39][40][41]. The cross sections of I-columns for different samples, as well as thermocouple locations are shown in Figure 6.…”

“…Heat transfer coefficients were determined for different types of fire protection in accordance with test protocols by solving the inverse heat conduction problem. The boundary conditions and model verification for structures with fire protection were provided in similar articles on this topic [30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

“…It is installed on structures using special straps and fasteners, as shown in Figure 16. The thermophysical properties of a protective material were determined through laboratory experiments based on five samples [40]. The results of the laboratory experiments as well as the calculated value of the K-factor (for the critical temperature of 500 • C) are summarized in Table 12.…”

“…The K-factor corresponds to the results of laboratory experiments performed in relation to the 20B1 beam (Ap/V = 294 m −1 ), taking into account the fire protection system (density-130 kg/m 3 ). The thermophysical properties of a protective material were determined through laboratory experiments based on five samples [40]. The results of the laboratory experiments as well as the calculated value of the K-factor (for the critical temperature of 500 °C) are summarized in Table 12.…”