• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.130-137
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• 2016

At a brewery, the base plate-to-shell weld seam of a $90-m^3$ vertical cylindrical steel tank failed catastrophically. The 4 ton tank "took off" like a rocket leaving its contents behind, and landed on a van, crushing it. The top of the tank reached a height of 30 m. The internal overpressure responsible for the failure was an estimated 60 kPa. A rupture disc rated at < 50 kPa provided overpressure protection and thus prevented the tank from being covered by the European Pressure Equipment Directive. This safeguard failed and it was later discovered that the rupture disc had been installed upside down. The organizational root cause of this incident may be a fundamental lack of appreciation of the hazards of large volumes of low-pressure compressed air or gas. A contributing factor may be that the standard piping and instrumentation diagram (P&ID) symbol for a rupture disc may confuse and lead to incorrect installation. Compressed air systems are ubiquitous. The medium is not toxic or flammable. Such systems however, when operated at "slight overpressure" can store a great deal of energy and thus constitute a hazard that ought to be addressed by safety managers.

• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.57 no.4
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• pp.207-212
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• 2020

To decide a separation distance of the redundant vital equipment in a naval ship, the damage radius due to an aerial explosion should be estimated. In this research, a simplified formula for the damage radius has been developed by using existing empirical formulae for reflected shock pressure and shock lethality value of equipment. As a numerical example, the damage radius for a typical pump aboard a naval ship has been calculated by the developed formula and compared with the results calculated by Measure of Total Integrated Ship Survivability (MOTISS) which is one of survivability analysis codes verified, validated and accredited by the US Navy. Also, comparison with the results calculated by existing other simplified formulae has been made.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Gas
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.89-95
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• 2016

Keeping the gas pipelines in the common utility tunnel is useful because it has a lower risk of corrosion than conventional burial, and can prevent from excavating construction. But, explosions in common utility tunnels can cause greater damage from the blast overpressure compared to outdoor explosions, due to nature of the confined environment. Despite this fact, however, research on common utility tunnels has been limited to fire hazard and little has been studied on the dangers of explosions. This study developed scenarios of methane gas explosion caused by gas leak from gas piping within the common utility tunnel followed by unknown ignition; the study then calculated the extent of the impact of the explosion on the facilities above, and suggested the needs for designing additional safety measures. Two scenarios were selected per operating condition of safety devices and the consequence analysis was carried out with FLACS, one of the CFD tools for explosion simulation. The overpressures for all scenarios are substantial enough to completely destroy most of the buildings. In addition, we have provided additional measures to secure safety especially reducing incident frequency.