DEVELOPMENT OF AN EXPERIMENTAL STAND TO ESTIMATE THE EVAPORATION RATE OF HYDROCARBON LIQUIDS SUMMARY

The problems of safety of oil and gas facilities receive much attention both on legislative and executive levels. One of the acute issues is the protection of people and territories against dangerous factors caused by emergency cases at oil depots. To assess fire safety it is required to know the evaporation rate of hydrocarbon liquids. The article is devoted to the development of an experimental stand to estimate the evaporation rate of combustible and flammable liquids. Such an experimental model is required because it is essential to study the influence of a model on convective mass transfer rates. Complying with the conditions of ventilation modeling, an experimental tank has been created in order to estimate the evaporation rate of oil products while preparing oil and gas storage tanks for repair works by using forced air ventilation to remove combustible gases from the inside of the tanks. This experimental tank is a vertical cylindrical vessel made of organic glass of 3 mm length. The construction of this tank is similar to a vertical 5000 m3 cylindrical steel tank. The scale model is 17 times smaller than the industrial tank. One of the conditions for the experiment was the constant air flow from the fan. The article contains a fundamental scheme of the experimental stand. During the experiment the concentration of fuel vapours inside the tank and in the gas-air mixture was measured. This was done using gas analyser GANK-4. GANK-4 is used for the constant automatic control of the concentration of hazardous substances in the atmosphere, in the working area, in industrial waste when samples are taken and put into fluoroplastic containers together with a diluent. It is also used in technological processes to protect the environment, to guarantee workplace safety and to optimise technological processes. The article contains a block diagram of GANK-4 gas analyser. In order to study the details of mass transfer experimental research has been conducted to estimate the evaporation rate of different liquids including water. The article contains a graph showing changes of the evaporation rate of a single-component liquid and multi-component hydrocarbon liquids while ventilating the experimental tank. The results of the research suggest that the experimental stand can be used to estimate the evaporation rate of hydrocarbon liquids.