The Consequence Analysis of Pressure Vessel Failure

Abstract:

After a chemical vessel suffering a rupture, BLEVE, fireball, jet fire, and dispersion of toxic substance may be the most common failure ways. Which give rise to a great threat to people’s life, process plants and surrounding environment. This paper presents an overview of the mechanism and the consequences for these failures; finally, ALOHA software simulation resorted to evaluating the consequences for all kinds of hazard, a vertical tank with the size of diameter=10, tank length=20m, containing the propane liquid/gas mixture with a volume of 1571 cubic meters, the mass of the chemical is calculated by the software automatically with a value of 554 tons. All the possible failures have been simulated by the ALOHA software, including：1) leaking tank, chemical is not burning as in escapes into the atmosphere; 2) leaking tank, chemical is burning as a jet fire; and 3) BLEVE, tank explodes and chemical burns in a fireball. Furthermore, there are three types hazard available to analyze the situation that chemical is not burning as it escapes into the atmosphere, they are: a) toxic area of vapor cloud; b) flammable area of vapor cloud; and c) blast area of vapor cloud explosion. The result reveals that the farthest threat zone reaches 2.2km in the case of a fireball triggered by a BLEVE, and the result has been viewed and discussed in details.

• Periodical: Advanced Materials Research (Volumes 396-398)
• Pages: 66-70
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/AMR.396-398.66
• Online since: November 2011
• Authors: Zhi Xiang Xing, Xian Jin Wang
• Keywords: ALOHA, Bleve, Gas Diffusion, Vessel Failure

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