It is of great significance to study the behavior of leaked petroleum gas from oil storage tanks for the safety of the oil reserve base and the prevention and control of the environmental pollution. In this study, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, FLUENT, is used to model the advection-diffusion behavior of the petroleum gas leaked from an oil storage tank surrounding by an array of tanks in a reserve base. In the simulation, the wind condition is verified by a wind tunnel experimental data. The location of the gas leakage is set on the top of a chosen tank and the leakage from different tank in the array is considered in the simulation. It is found that the tank array considerably alters the wind flow, resulting in a less significant advection-diffusion effect on the petroleum gas leaked from downstream tank than upstream tank. This reveals the importance of optimal deployment of the oil storage tanks and, if necessary, a further consideration of the mitigation plan for specific tanks.
From 2003, China began to build oil reserve bases and the first national petroleum reserve base, Zhenhai Base, was constructed and started operating in October 2006. After more than ten years of further development, the base currently consists of 12 reserve base with an overall capacity of 60+ million tons. Following a rapid expansion of the oil reserve bases, the safety of the oil reserve is increasingly recognized, especially the air pollution, risk of poisoning and explosion caused by the leakage of petroleum gas. To mitigate the risk, the behavior of the leaked gas needs to be well understood.
Both numerical and experimental approaches have been attempted to characterize the aerodynamic behavior of the leaked gas. Song et al (2008) conducted a CFD simulation and discussed the distribution and formation of gas concentration. Kim et al. (2013) used the FLACS software to simulate and analyse the gas explosion due to the hydrogen gas leakage. Their simulation results are verified by using the experimental data on hydrogen jets. Kountouriotis et al (2014) characterized the gas diffusion for the gasoline with different components subjected to different influencing factors (wind speed, wind direction, temperature, leakage location, etc.) by using the STAR-CD software. Huang et al (2016) used FLUENT software to simulate the leakage of petroleum gas from an inner floating roof tank, and found that the smaller the wind speed, the higher the quality of petroleum gas concentration. Hao et al (2019) used CFD technology to simulate the effects of the location of the leakage hole and wind speed on the petroleum gas leakage from a floating roof tank, and the results showed that the location of leakage hole and wind speed would have a significant influence on the accumulation location and diffusion range of petroleum gas after leakage. However, few researches on the leakage its advection-diffusion behavior for a tank group.
