Large-Scale VCE Consequence Modeling for Industrial Facility Siting, Risk Assessment, Hazard Mitigation Design, and Response Planning

PresentationNew, fully three dimensional, technologies are now making it possible to more quickly and accurately simulate and predict the consequences of accidental releases leading to vapor cloud explosions (VCE) at a wide variety of industrial facilities. The primary objective of these explosion consequence analysis (ECA) technologies is to assess building damage and occupant injury levels for both ‘individual’ and ‘all possible’ release and explosion scenarios. A typical industrial facility can have hundreds of potential release scenarios and hundreds of potential VCE locations leading to an exponential number of possible explosion scenarios. High speed 3D modeling techniques can provide updateable, on-going and real-time capabilities for analyzing individual and all possible release and explosion scenarios. These ECA technologies, combined with release probabilities, make possible quantitative risk assessments (QRA) which lead to better risk evaluations, mitigation strategies, risk management, and emergency response planning. In this paper, the Vapor Cloud Explosion Damage Assessment module in BREEZE ExDAM is used to demonstrate a high speed 3D modeling technique that can quickly 1) generate 3D models of large-scale chemical/petroleum facilities with hundreds of building structures, hundreds of release locations, and hundreds of congestion zones, 2) simulate, display, and document the consequences of individual release scenarios involving a subset of congestion zones within a single plume geometry, and 3) compute, display, and document the maximum consequence levels resulting from explosions at all identified congestion zones