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.