Incident analysis of various sections of a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) bottling plant

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the hazards associated with a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) bottling plant. Due to the release of LPG, different possible hazards, such as fireball, jet fire and vapour cloud explosion (VCE), may take place in the bottling plant. Each critical stages of bottling plants are briefly discussed and modelled in ALOHA and PHAST, and their simulated consequences of results are compared. In this article, the complete bottling plant has been divided into various risk zones which are expected accidental areas (like tank storage area, small domestic cylinder storage area, and LPG pump and compressor area). The risks during handling and the use of LPG have been analysed and modelled and their results are compared. Among all the accident scenarios, fireball was found to be the most dangerous condition in the bullet and small cylinder storage units. Overall, bullet storage unit was found to be the most hazardous section having the most destructive damage (with an overpressure of 0.41 bar), which causes complete destruction, large number of injuries and fatalities (within a distance of 215 m) in case of VCE and having a thermal intensity of 37.5 kW/m² which causes deaths due to burn up to the largest distance (324 m) in the case of fireball.

KEYWORDS:

• LPG bottling plant
• hazards
• storage
• small cylinder
• flammable vapour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Vimal Chandra Srivastava http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5321-7981