Accidents involving liquids: A step ahead in modeling pool spreading, evaporation and burning

The manuscript focuses on the modeling of industrial accidents involving liquid substances, i.e. liquid pools. The paper discusses how to improve Webber's model (1990) for evaluating the liquid pool dynamics in terms of spreading (onto land and water) and evaporation rates. In particular, our attention was devoted to the following points: friction term in presence of film boiling; evaluation of the friction velocity; determination of the wind profile index; evaluation of the conductive heat flux: the pool radius dynamics: turbulent mixing onto water; dispersion model input data. The paper presents, also, how to couple the proposed model to the pool burning dynamics. This allows simulating the burning of a spreading pool. Thanks to its prompt response in terms of CPU time, the proposed model is helpful not only under risk assessment or under emergency preparedness, but also during accident response. A comparison between experimental data and the model predictions validates the model effectiveness in simulating real accidental events. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.