No abstract

BackgroundAs one of the most frequently occurring accidents in a chemical plant, a fire accident may occur at any place where transfer or handling of combustible materials is routinely performed.MethodsIn particular, a jet fire incident in a chemical plant operated under high pressure may bring severe damage. To review this event numerically, Computational Fluid Dynamics methodology was used to simulate a jet fire at a pipe of a compressor under high pressure.ResultsFor jet fire simulation, the Kemeleon FireEx Code was used, and results of this simulation showed that a structure and installations located within the shelter of a compressor received serious damage.ConclusionThe results confirmed that a jet fire may create a domino effect that could cause an accident aside from the secondary chemical accident.

Due to numerous hazardous chemicals to handle, the process plant industry has a higher risk of fire, explosion, and toxic release than other industries. Reviewing the accidents at process plants in the past, it is clear that fire accidents occur with the highest frequency, leading this study to consider accidental fire scenarios at process plants. For the scenario of an incident, a jet fire involving a massive amount of hydrogen gas to be processed or delivered at the process plant has been selected. The analysis of incident outcome resulting from the hydrogen jet fire has been implemented through the computational fluid dynamics simulation methodology Kameleon FireEx. Based on the outcome of this simulation, the consequences of a jet fire with high temperature and heat radiation are analyzed and evaluated. In addition, the results from Phast ver. 7.11 simulation for the same scenario are presented for comparison and further validation. 407

-The demand for hydrogen is steadily increasing every year, and the facilities to produce and transfer hydrogen are being increased as well. Therefore, the possibility of a critical accident at hydrogen is expected to increase. Furthermore, the materials most likely to cause accidents at industrial sites are LPG 61%, hydrogen 12%, and LNG 10%, and the frequency of accidents due to these three combustible gases is relatively high. Thus, a CFD simulation was used to compute the explosion risk of danger-frequent combustible gaseshydrogen, LNG, and LPG -within a limited space, and the outcomes were compared and analyzed to review the risk of explosion of each gase within a limited space.

As the simple empirical and phenomenological model applied to the analysis of leakage and explosion of chemical substances does not regard numerous variables, such as positional density of installations and equipment, turbulence, atmospheric conditions, obstacles, and wind effects, there is a significant gap between actual accident consequence and computation. Therefore, the risk management of a chemical plant based on such a computation surely has low reliability. Since a process plant is required to have outcomes more similar to the actual outcomes to secure highly reliable safety, this study was designed to apply the CFD (computational fluid dynamics) simulation technique to analyze a virtual prediction under numerous variables of leakages and explosions very similarly to reality, in order to review the computation technique of the practical safety distance at a process plant.

This paper describes and reports an analysis of an explosion accident at a wastewater storage pond in South Korea, which resulted in six fatalities and one injury. This study was aimed at analyzing and determining the possibility of fracture of concrete structure by vapor cloud explosion (VCE) and ignition point of explosion, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for the explosion simulation. The result obtained via CFD analysis was connected with finite element analysis (FEA) to accurately review the structural damages resulting from the explosion. As a result, the mechanism of the accident was determined, and preventive solutions against such accidents are recommended.