A study on the effect of trees on gas explosions

The downstream as well as the upstream oil and gas industry has for a number of years been aware of the potential for flame acceleration and overpressure generation due to obstacles in gas clouds caused by leaks of flammable substances. To a large extent the obstacles were mainly considered to be equipment, piping, structure etc. typically found in many installations. For land based installations there may however also be a potential for flame acceleration in regions of vegetation, like trees and bushes. This is likely to have been the case for the Buncefield explosion, which led to the work described in the present paper. The study contains both a numerical and an experimental part and was performed in the period 2006–2008 (Bakke and Brewerton, 2008; Van Wingerden and Wilkins, 2008)