INDUSTRIAL

Angus Water Spray System. Pic courtesy of Angus Fire

Fires in Tanks of Hydrocarbons

By J. C. Jones
Department of Engineering University of Aberdeen j.c.jones@ eng.abdn.ac.uk

We are still not very far in time from the Buncefield accident, which was a subject of a previous article in this periodical.1 The present article deals with selected aspects of fires in tanks of flammable liquids and starts with a fairly recent case study, that at Glenpool Oklahoma in 2003 storage where an ignition source is believed to have been provided by static electricity. The behaviour of such liquids once ignited, after extinguishment procedures have begun, will then be discussed and again use will be made of case studies.
Electrostatic effects as an ignition source t Glenpool a tank previously having held gasoline was being filled with diesel. Guidelines apply when such a change is taking place, and these include avoidance of splashing and of excessive flow speeds or other mechanically vigorous operations which could lead to the creation of charge. What might have happened at Glenpool is that charge was created in the diesel which ignited residual vapours from the gasoline previously contained in the tank. Though none is a conductor of electricity in the conventional sense, petroleum fractions do differ significantly from each other in their electrical conductivities and this is a factor in handling and storage safety as static electricity can provide an ignition source as happened at Glenpool. There are two ways in which such effects can be prevented. One is to raise the conductivity of the
fuel itself by incorporating a fuel conductivity improver, aka. a static dissipater additive, thereby enabling accidentally created static electricity to be dispersed and avoiding creation of a spark. This is common for aircraft turbine fuels (ATF). When crude oil is refined sulphur concentrates in the higher boiling fractions. Diesel has the highest boiling range of all the atmospheric distillates and so tends to be high in sulphur. The sulphur content can be reduced by hydrotreating fairly straightforwardly, but such treatment tends to reduce the electrical conductivity thereby exacerbating the static electricity hazard. A fuel conductivity improver is in such circumstances necessitated. One such having found application to hydrotreated diesel has amongst its ingredients dodecylbenzenesulphonic acid and an amine polymer. An alternative or complementary approach to the use of a fuel conductivity improver is the use
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INTERNATIONAL FIRE FIGHTER