The Study of the Weather Impact Conditions on Fire Risk (Tank Fire) at the Condensate Storage Farm in the RTO Marine Terminal

Abstract

This study presents an in-depth analysis of the impact of meteorological conditions (temperature, humidity, and wind speed) on the effect distance, represented here by the thermal radiation flux generated by a tank fire at the condensate terminal of the Western Regional Pipeline Transport Directorate (RTO), which is located in the Arzew industrial zone and operated by Sonatrach Oil Company Major. The meteorological data used, covering the period from 2019 to 2024 (15,000 data points), were analysed by using advanced statistical techniques and predictive models to provide accurate and reliable insights. The results indicate that the view factor is the most influential variable affecting the thermal radiation flux, which plays a critical role in determining the impact distance, accounting for 94.97% of the variance in the multiple regression model. Wind speed and inclination angle have a moderate impact, approximately 1.8% and 1.3% respectively, while other variables such as temperature, humidity, and emissivity have a negligible effect (1.3×10⁻⁵, 0.3% and 0% respectively).

Correlation analysis between the studied parameters and the thermal flux reveals strong positive correlations for the factor view and the inclination angle, with coefficients of 0.995 and 0.625, respectively, moderate values for wind speed (0.371) and atmospheric transmissivity (0.0186) and negligible values for temperature, humidity, emissivity and flame height. Finally, the multiple regression model demonstrates excellent performance with an R² value of 0.9996. Moreover, the very low standard error (0.0376), the high F-statistic (5,646,171.787) and a p-value of 0 confirm the model's high precision and strong statistical significance.