Forced ventilation effect by Air-Fin-Cooler on flammable gas cloud dispersion

This paper is the second installment of a paper published on Process Safety and Environment Protection in 2013, which evaluates the Air-Fin-Cooler (AFC) forced ventilation effect over natural ventilation inside congested LNG process train, i.e., modularized LNG, considering the Air Change per Hour (ACH) using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. This second paper evaluates the effect of forced ventilation on gas cloud dispersion using CFD in order to evaluate possible design measures, such as safety distance in trains and whether to shut down the AFC in case of releases. The results of this evaluation show that gas cloud accumulation is reduced by AFC induced air flow in the case of shorter separation distances between modules. Based on the results, two design measures are proposed, i.e., keep AFC running during emergency and train orientation against prevailing wind direction.