Fire Consequence Analysis for Two Parallel-Running Pipelines

One natural gas pipeline and product oil pipeline is designed to be routed through the same pipe gallery to minimize land use. The horizontal distances of two parallel pipelines are 1.5m, 1.1m and 0.7m at buried sector, tunnel sector and box culvert when crossing railway, respectively. How to prevent fire on one pipeline from affecting the other becomes a major concern for authority and operator.

Scandpower was invited to evaluate risk that failure of one pipeline to affecting the integrity of another. The most severe scenario, i.e. jet fire, was simulated by Kameleon FireEx KFX®, a commercial CFD tool, to estimate the fire accidental load; while VessFire®, a commercial simulation program for time-dependent non-linear analysis of thermo-mechanical response exposed to fire, was used to evaluate the integrity of the exposed pipeline. The results show that exposed natural gas line will lose its integrity but the product oil line will not. Sensitivity cases were studied as well to verify the recommendations.

Key words: Fire, Pipeline, Parallel, CFD