Evaluation of Harm Effect Distances after High-Pressure Natural Gas Pipeline Leakage

Abstract

The leakage of high-pressure natural gas pipeline can lead to serious accidents and pose a significant threat to people and buildings in the vicinity of the failure location. This paper examines the harm effect distances of different consequences based on harmful criteria. And possible consequences caused by pipeline leakage are assumed and their subsequent harm effect distances are computed using the software EFFECTS. Harm effect distances evaluation was performed considering jet fire and vapor cloud explosion (VCE) as the worst-case scenarios. Results show that for pipeline leakage, the jet fire produces longer harm effect distances, so the jet fire scenario should be considered as the limiter for harm effect distances evaluation. Based on the analysis of this paper, harm effect distances caused by the leakage of a high-pressure natural gas pipeline can be evaluated, which will not only be useful to prevent and control natural gas pipeline leakage accidents, but also provide a good reference to design of new constructed pipelines.