Safety evaluation on LNG bunkering : to enhance practical establishment of safety zone

Jeong, Byongug and Park, Sayyoon and Ha, Seungman and Lee, Jae-ung (2020) Safety evaluation on LNG bunkering : to enhance practical establishment of safety zone. Ocean Engineering. ISSN 0029-8018 (In Press)

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Abstract

This paper is to evaluate the LNG bunkering safety for a 50,000 dead weight tonnage bulk carrier renowned as the world first LNG fuelled bulk carrier. To establish a proper level of the safety zone against the potential risk of gas release from the LNG bunkering systems encompassing from truck to ship, it introduces an enhanced quantitative risk assessment process with two key ideas: firstly, the integration of the population-independent analysis with the population-dependent analysis, and secondly, the combination between the probabilistic analysis and CFD simulation for gas dispersion. Research results reveal that the appropriate levels of the safe zone can be set at 28.8 m in 1E-4 /year criterion that concerns the individual risk of a fatality at the given distance to the risk source of 1 in 10,000 years, whereas at 46.6 m (in 1E-5 /year criterion) and at 213.3 m (in 1E-6 / year criterion) when the area within 5 % and higher gas concentration in air is regarded the critical zone. On the other hand, in case of the critical area considered to be within 2.5 % and higher gas concentration in air, the safety zone will much expand to 34.9 m (in 1E-4 /year criterion), 80.4 m (in 1E-5 /year criterion) and 541.8 m (in 1E-6 /year criterion). These dissimilarities suggest that LNG bunkering ports pay attention to selecting appropriate safety criteria which would considerably change the range of safety zones. The case study also demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach that can remedy the shortcomings/shortfalls of existing technical and regulatory guidance on establishing the zones. It is, therefore, believed that the risk assessment approach proposed in this paper can contribute to determining the appropriate level of safety zones whereas providing practical insight into port authorities and flag states.

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