Investigate the Causes of Fires and Explosions at External Floating Roof Tanks: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of industry, energy (especially fossil fuels) demand is increasing. This issue is becoming much more serious in the oil industry. The oil industry, and especially refineries, normally uses large storage tanks. Storage tanks in addition to advantages such as saving steel, saving occupied area and cost-effective construction, contain significant amounts of flammable and hazardous hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals. Oil tanks fire and explosion incidents have been common in recent days and occur frequently and repeatedly and are a high threat to life safety. In order to prevent the occurrence of these incidents, it is necessary to identify their causes. The aim of this study was to classify the types of incidents occurred in the floating roof tanks and to determine their causes. In this study, initially, some of fires and explosions occurred in the external floating roof tanks collected by using a large number of various databases. Then, causes of fires and explosions in the external floating roof tanks categorized in 11 criteria and 78 sub-criteria. The results of this study can help the specialists in floating roof tanks design and construction. As well as safety and fire professionals can also use the results from this study to prevent and control fire and explosion accidents in this type of tanks.