Abstract
When a flammable liquid is accidentally released, for example due to the rupture of a plant storage tank or a transportation incident, there is a possibility of ignition, which results in a pool fire. In these cases the estimate of the impact areas of pool fires assumes a great importance, especially when there is the real possibility of generating serious consequences (domino effects). The paper illustrates a case study, referred to an Italian biorefinery, that produces bioethanol from biomasses. In the last years there has been a growing use of bioethanol in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable fuels. A very important issue is that the heat flux from an ethanol fire can be significantly higher than that of a petroleum fire. The reason of this difference is that gasolines and hydrocarbons fires generate larger amounts of soot, which tends to block the visible parts of the flames, thereby reducing the heat flux. On the contrary an ethanol fire is almost free from soot and therefore the associated heat flux is not dissipated by smoke. In particular the paper describes a semi-empirical pool fire model, which uses a selection of sub-models correlations, aimed at determining the geometrical configuration of the flame (average height, tilt angle and elongated diameter) and thermal radiation as functions of meteorological parameters such as air humidity and wind velocity.
