DETERMINATION OF THE AREA AFFECTED BY THE SPREAD OF BURNING FUEL DUE TO BOILOVER

Boilover is one of the most dangerous accidents that can happen in an atmospheric hydrocarbons storage tank, it happens when the water at the bottom of the storage tank is heated to a temperature where it is evaporate and push’s the hydrocarbons out of the tank causing a ground fire and flame enlargements. And the main objective of this study is determination of the area affected by the spread of ejected hydrocarbons from the storage tank due to boilover causing a ground fire which is extremely dangerous. And for achieving this objective a set of experiments have been performed on a hydrocarbons mixture consisting of 50 % Diesel oil and 50% Gasoline is used. This mixture has been chosen after running some experiments on three different types of mixtures. Tow set of experiments have been performed and from the result analysis we were able to find equation relating the volume of the mixture in the storage tank to the area affected. And from both set of experiments we found that the relation between the fuel volume and the area affected is best described as a polynomial relationship. Moreover a different set of experiments is also performed using crude oil which gave an unpromising result and we were unable to find an equation relating the area affected to the crude oil volume in the storage tank.