Failure Consequence Modelling of High Pressure Hydrocarbon Transmission Pipeline

In the present century, one of the challenges of the energy industry is the integrity and security of pipeline systems, that constitute the most efficient and safest means of transportation for oil and gas hydrocarbons. To pursue this goal, owing to the complex nature of interacting process governing the discharge rate, the use of a rigorous CFD model is an essential pre-requisite for producing reliable pipeline failure consequence data. For this reason, the Department of Chemical Engineering of The University College London (UCL) has developed a commercial software called PipeTech, which has been thought for predicting the outflow as well as the variation with space and time of the physical effects relative to all possible final scenarios following the release (i.e jet fire, pool fire, fireball, explosions) which can occur after a rupture along a pipe. Over the years, several updating have been conducted on the computer software PipeTech, with the aim to improve its reliability. Nowadays, 84 versions of this software exist. This work is focused on the investigation about the last two subsequent versions of PipeTech (V83 and V84), in order to understand which of these is the most reliable in predicting the outflow data following a rupture at the end of a long Pipeline (FBR/orifice). In particular, this aim will be pursued by a systematic in-depth investigation about the release models used in the last two versions of this software and by using some experimental data. In the second part of this work, the most reliable version of PipeTech will be identified and used to make a full validation of the jet fire model employed in such software. In order to achieve this purpose, some experimental data as well as the commercial software Phast (V8.0) were applied.