Fire Hazard Calculations for Hydrocarbon Pool Fires – Application of “fire Dynamics Simulator – Fds” to the Risk Assessment of an Oil Extraction Platform

Abstract

A major area for fire protection in the industrial sector deals with controlling the impact from hydrocarbon fires. The primary mechanism for injury or damage from such fires is thermal radiation, that can be evaluated with the aid of different software. Analytical models are those most widely used for this purpose. Other aspects of great importance to assess the possibility for an individual to survive a fire, like smoke emission, toxic combustion products dispersion and visibility, and the temperature profile reached by each component involved in the pool fire (necessary for a better understanding of the structure fire resistance) are however not easily assessed or not assessed at all by analytical models. These information can be obtained by means of computational fluid dynamics software like the “Fire Dynamics Simulator” (FDS), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States Department of Commerce, that allows the 3-dimensional analysis of fires both in enclosed spaces and in the open. This model has been applied for the analysis of fires in enclosed structures (buildings, underground stations, tunnel fires). It has been recently applied in D’Appolonia to the assessment of pool fires for different Offshore Oil Platforms. The paper will discuss the results achieved and the comparison with the results obtained by analytical modeling.