Are All Our Pools Circular? How to Properly Address Your Hazard from a Pool Fire

A major issue in the chemical and petrochemical industries is to accurately determined the impact of possible hazards on equipment, buildings and personnel. This paper will focus on pool fires, which can be defined as a turbulent diffusion fire burning above a horizontal pool of vaporizing hydrocarbons. Hazards from pool fires are frequently associated with the storage and transportation of commonly used flammable and combustible liquids such as gasoline, diesel, crude oil, condensate and hexane. While pool fires are relatively simple phenomena, which include a key feature whereby heat transfer from the fire influences or controls the rate of vaporization and hence size of the fire, there are other geometrical constraints that can influence the appearance and impact of the fire on neighboring structures or personnel.

There are many models and empirical tools that are available to evaluate the thermal loads resulting from pool fires; however, these models are typically limited to circular pools. The goal of this paper will be to provide an alternate and more accurate tool to predict the hazards from pool fires, which can not only model circular pools, but also hazards originating from more commonly shaped enclosures to contain spills such as squares, rectangles, and even polygons (with and without rims).

Simulating a polygonal shaped pool is particularly useful to account for the tank pit fire scenario, allowing you to draw the shape of the bund (dike) that contains the spill of flammable liquid to more accurately predict the impact from the ensuing fire.