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Contenido archivado el 2022-12-27

FOAM AND WATER DELUGE SYSTEMS FOR OFFSHORE OIL PLATFORMS

Objetivo

The main scope of the project was improving the fire protection of offshore oil platforms by a better use of foam and water deluge systems. This was accomplished by a series of studies including reliability assessment, components improvement and mathematical modelling of the main phenomena involved in the performance of such systems. The final product of the research has been a group of proposals for engineering guidelines, technical standards and test methods to allow a more reliable, effective and quantitative design of foam/water deluge systems. The project was carried out in cooperation with the British company RM Consultants Ltd and the participation of the oil company AGIP SpA.
The main expected result i.e. the obtainment of experimental and the theoretical evidences to support the improvement of the current design practice of F&W deluge systems has been achieved.
The transfer of the project results into fire engineering practice has already begun; in fact a standardization committee has been formed by UNI (the Italian Standardization Body) and the results of such committee work is thought to be thought to CEN and ISO level in about one year. AGIP has decided to setup an internal design guideline for the design of F&W deluge for the production of their offshore oil rigs.
The equipment development work necessary for the execution of the project has lead to a series of innovative instruments that will be useful for further research work on fire protection engineering.
A large amount of original data has been collected and is now available for conducting further theoretical work on modelling fire and fire mitigation dynamics.
The theoretical work on the basic fire pool fire model has demnonstrated that excellent agreement can be achieved with the actual performance of deluge systems and that the road is open to the extension to the treatment of the complete real-life fire scenarios.
Impressive novel evidences of performance were collected by full scale and foam & water deluge systems were confirmed to be a very effective and covenient approach to the protection of offshore oil rigs.
Foam and water systems can now be designed and optimised in a more reliable and cost effective way.
The main goals and activities of the research can be grouped and summarized as follows:
a) TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION
- development of methods for measuring the physical characteristics of
sprayed foams
- development of methods to estimate the parameters of foam spray globules
(size, weight, density dsitributions)
- development of methods for estimating the performance of sprayers with
reference to their characteristics
- development of methods to measure the cooling effectiveness of sprayed foam
on structures, vessels, fire-walls, etc. when impiged by jet-fires
- investigating the possibility to improve the current sprinklers
- performance of a structured series of full scale fire tests with extensive
instrumentation (flow, temperature, thermal radiation, etc.)
- studying the surface cooling processes by foam vs.water
- modelling of sprayed foam/flame interaction
- modelling of pool fire coverage and extinguishing by sprayed foam
b) RELIABILITY STUDIES
- determination ofreliability characteristics for the components of foam and
water deluge systems
- determination of reliability characteristics for the components of fire
detection systems
- detailed reliability analysis of alternate foam and water deluge systems
c) PROPOSALS OF STANDARDS AND SPECIFICATIONS
- preparation of testing methods and specifications to be proposed
for the evaluation of foam sprayers
- preparation of tentative standards for foam and water deluge system layout
and engineering

Convocatoria de propuestas

Data not available

Régimen de financiación

DEM - Demonstration contracts

Coordinador

Sabo SpA
Aportación de la UE
Sin datos
Dirección
Via Caravaggi 9
24040 Levate Bergamo
Italia

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Coste total
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