Numerical Simulation Of LPG Spherical Tank’s Leakage Diffusion And Burning Accident In A Petrochemical Enterprise

Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is an important fuel and chemical material, it has been widely used in industrial and civil fields. LPG is a kind of inflammable and explosive dangerous substance. It is easy to cause serious accidents in the process of storage, particularly in the LPG storage tank area. Because the storage tanks are concentrated and large storage capacity, once the storage tank leakage, LPG with pressure flow out from the storage tank, intense vaporization occurs immediately and diffuse with the atmospheric. If not timely take effective measures, easy to cause fire and explosion accident, causing serious casualties and huge property losses. Therefore, studying and analysis the leakage diffusion of LPG tank and burning risk, finding out the cause of the leakage diffusion and burning accidents, predicting the severity of the accident consequences, has important theory value and practical significance to predicting, preventing and controlling the LPG storage tank leakage and burning accidents, and ensuring the production security.Thesis taking a LPG spherical tank area of a petrochemical enterprise in Qinzhou, Guangxi as the research object and simplified the actual situation of the scene. The physical and chemical properties, risk characteristics and storage of LPG, and leakage diffusion form, leakage, influence factors and leakage diffusion and burning models of LPG storage tanks are introduced in this paper. Contrast the advantages and disadvantages of the theoretical models to numerical analysis methods. Decide to use CFD numerical simulation method to analyze the leakage diffusion and burning of LPG.First of all, using FLUENT software to calculate the 3-d numerical simulation of LPG spherical tank area’s leakage diffusion, study the rules of the spread of LPG gas cloud, analyze the influences of diffusion time, wind speed and the amount of leakage of LPG diffusion. It is concluded that diffusion time, wind speed and the amount of leakage have an effect on the diffusion direction, distance, concentration distribution and the explosion limit range.Second, build the numerical models of burning process of LPG gas cloud burning. Using FLUENT software to calculate the 2-d numerical simulation of burning process of LPG gas cloud formed by leakage and diffusion. Study the rules of burning process of LPG gas cloud in the spherical tank zone, and analyze the influences of wind speed and initial concentration of burning process of LPG gas cloud. It is concluded that the burning process of LPG gas cloud experience the process of start, development and the end. And wind speed and initial concentration have an effect on the burning temperatures, range of burning, burning duration and concentration of each component.The research results have a guiding significance for the enterprises to prevent and predict spherical tank area’s accidents in the daily production management works.