Study of Boilover Fire: The Relationship between Fuel Layer Thickness and Time to Start Boilover.

Boilover is the most dangerous accident that can happen in an atmospheric storage tank which can lead to serious consequences especially to emergency responders. Boilover is a violent ejection of certain liquid hydrocarbon due to prolonged storage tank fire. The delayed boilover occurrence is an unknown strong parameter especially during the emergency response operations. It is important to understand what happens within the fuel in a storage tank during a fire. Such understanding is essential especially for predicting the start time of boilover. Accordingly, boilover experiments were planned and carried out with the intentions to evaluate the nature and consequences of boilover. In this work, it is aimed to investigate the relationship between the time to start boilover and the effect of fuel layer thickness. Boilover onset time upon full surface fire and the size of area affected due to the ejection of burning fuel will be observed and analysed. Based on the experimental results, a simple correlation to predict the time to start boilover will be proposed.