Vulnerability assessment of process pipelines affected by flood events

Technological accidents can be triggered by the impact of natural events on industrial areas. Recent studies highlight the problem and the need to assess possible damage to process pipelines involved in flooding scenarios. The present study proposes for the first time a vulnerability model for this equipment category impacted by floods and suitable for the implementation in quantitative risk assessment (QRA) studies for the process industry. A mechanical model was first developed and compared against data available from the historical analysis of past accidents. The model is then applied to several geometries of process pipelines, with the aim of extending the range of conditions for failure prediction and developing a set of simplified correlations for the evaluation of pipelines failure. A simplified approach is finally adopted to develop the vulnerability model, in order to estimate the pipelines failure probability based on the analysis of critical design parameters and flooding conditions. In order to test the potentialities of the method, the vulnerability model proposed was implemented in the framework of a QRA and applied to an industrial case-study.