An integrated approach for fire and explosion consequence modelling

Fire and explosion are accidents which potentially can occur in oil and gas processing facilities. While fire and explosion could occur as a consequence of each other, most published work has assessed fire and explosion separately, ignoring interactions between the two phenomena. The current study proposes a novel approach to model the entire sequences involved in a potential accident using liquid and gas release incidents as two test cases. The integrated scenario is modelled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes FLACS and FDS. An integrated approach is adopted to analyse and represent the effects (injuries/death) of the accident. The proposed approach can be used in designing safety measures to minimize the adverse impacts of such accidents. It can also serve as an important tool to develop safety training to improve emergency preparedness plans.