Explosion Relief Panels and Their Effect on Gas Explosion Overpressure

Explosion relief panels are commonly used on offshore installations to improve working environment and at the same time allow venting of gas explosions to control explosion risk. This is very important particularly in arctic regions where requirements for acceptable working environment may easily conflict with requirements for low explosion risk. Explosion relief panels have been tested in low congestion, medium scale explosion tests, and based on such tests it has been concluded that replacing solid walls with relief panels reduces explosion loads significantly. It is not clear whether this conclusion can be extended to real offshore modules, which are significantly larger and more congested. In the present paper the gas explosion simulator FLACS is therefore used to investigate the effect of different wall configurations (e.g. open, solid or relief panels) on explosion overpressure in a large, highly congested offshore module. The objective is to assess whether in reality similar benefits from using relief panels as seen in the experiments can be expected.