Fire engulfment of a storage tank at BAM-TTS
Source: BAM
The fire engulfment of storage tanks of hazardous materials is among the most critical scenarios in hazard assessment of industrial value chains. Laboratory and full-scale experimental trials are used to test the tank performance and integrity in such scenarios. However, strong uncertainties usually affect the actual fire load experienced by the tank, in particular when large-scale experiments are carried out in open test fields. Such uncertainties arise from several factors difficult to control during experimental tests, such as the atmospheric conditions as there is the influence of wind drifts influencing the actual fire engulfment, the flame temperature and the flame dynamic distribution around the target. Consequently, verifying the concordance of an experimental test with standard test criteria and defining accurate boundary conditions in correlated model simulations is challenging. In this study, the development of a novel method for the analysis of fire conditions based on image processing is presented. The approach allows identifying the flame coverage on the target surface during the test and provides an accurate map of the flame distribution on the equipment over time. The approach is tested using experimental data from a full-scale fire test campaign carried out on liquid hydrogen cryogenic tanks. The results prove to be accurate in replicating the experimental temperatures measured on the outer tank shell during the test. The proposed methodology can be used to better understand the results of experimental fire tests and to characterize realistic fire scenarios, also supporting the definition of fire test requirements. Moreover, the approach produces results that can be implemented as advanced space-time-varying boundary conditions in simulation models, improving their accuracy in reproducing real cases.
Digital image processing for the advanced characterization and simulation of experimental fire tests
Alice Schiaroli, Christian Mata, Giordano Emrys Scarponi, Abdel Karim Habib, Martin Kluge, Federico Ustolin, Valerio Cozzani
Process Safety and Environmental Protection, 2025