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Fire testing is an essential part of the hypothetical, cumulative mechanical and thermal accident test conditions that shall guarantee package safety in severe accidents. Not only for radioactive material transport packages but also for other containments of dangerous goods international standards require specific thermal load specifications. Following the guideline 'Safety in tech-nology and chemistry' BAM as a scientific and technical German federal government institute operates a 12 km² large open air test facility for experimental investigations of dangerous goods and their containments. On an area besides the well-known 200-ton drop test facility we put into operation new fire test facilities. This facility area provides two fire test stands that are utilized with liquid Propane as fuel from a central earth-covered 60 m³ LPG storage tank. From that stor-age the Propane is pumped via pipelines to the test stands where the gas is released from nozzles, and ignited by ignition burners. The fire exposed test facility areas are 12 m x 8 m. Fire test facil-ity B (with gas release nozzles below water-covered ground) is designed for fire testing of con-tainers that may burst during the test. Fire test facility A (with ring burner systems) is designed for heavy test objects up to 200 tons, e.g. for full-scale spent fuel casks.
The paper will present a detailed description of the facility, insight into first test performances, and results of calorimeter fire tests, using containers of various sizes, to verify the absorbed heat fluxes, demonstrating that regulatory fire test conditions are met, and that the Propane fire can be compared with a kerosene or heating oil pool fire.
The effectiveness of pressure relief devices on cylinders and tanks from a German point of view
(2002)
Fire accidents during road and rail transport are not occurring very often. In particular fire accidents with total fire engulfment of tanks seem to be rather rare. Up to now authorities in Europe officially are of the opinion that in densely populated regions like Europe in the space of time between the beginning of a fire and the rupture of a tank measures could be taken like cooling of the heated tank surface and evacuation of the area probably affected by an explosion. Therefore, no requirements with regard to fire protection measures concerning transport tanks for land mode like the application of safety relief devices have to be met. Due to some catastrophic accidents being discussed in public even European authorities are considering the pros and cons of fire protection measures.
Nevertheless in sparsely populated regions and during transport at sea fire accidents have been looked at since ever as seriously dangerous events. Therefore, multi modal tanks for the transport of dangerous goods have to be fitted with safety relief devices. The delivery capacity of these devices has to be such that, in the event of total fire engulfment, the pressure inside the tank does not exceed certain limits.
With regard to accident records and results of fire tests it has to be stated that portable tanks may rupture violently, even if the tanks are fitted with pressure-relief devices adequately designed for the heat flux of full fire engulfment.
Therefore, the lecture will be dealing with the results of fire testing of tanks and conclusions to be drawn and considerations on:
the advantages of different fire protection measures for transport tanks,
the pros and cons of safety relief devices for cylinders and transport tanks,
improvement of regulations and recommendations.