1. Plant descriptions

1.1 Field of application

This article examines the hazardous phenomena that can occur in specific petroleum installations: storage depots for flammable liquids. The term is used here to designate facilities whose main function is the storage of liquid hydrocarbons. Only atmospheric storage facilities (i.e. with a pressure close to atmospheric pressure) are considered. Pressurized and refrigerated storage facilities are excluded from the scope of this article.

Although the article is written from the point of view of oil depots, the description of the phenomena and the modeling approaches are of course applicable to other facilities with atmospheric storage (refinery storage depots, for example). An example of a storage depot is shown in figure