Transportuojamų pavojingųjų medžiagų keliamos rizikos tyrimas ir mažinimas įrengiant saugos barjerus

The dissertation presents an approach to decreasing the risk of transportation of hazardous materials (hazmat transportation) by applying construction-related solutions. They consist in deploying safety barriers between transportation routes and vulnerable property built in the roadside territory. The attention is focussed on the hazmat transportation accidents known as boiling liquid expanding vapour explosions (BLEVEs). It is considered how to predict thermal and mechanical effects of BLEVEs on potential barriers or roadside property. It is suggested to interlink results of this prediction with the conventional structural response techniques used for estimating the susceptibility of safety barriers to the effects of BLEVEs. The dissertation consists of introduction, three chapters, conclusions, list of references and papers published by the author as well as four annexes. The first chapter presents a review and evaluation of the published work on the risk posed by the hazmat transportation. In addition, existing approaches to the design of safety barriers suitable to protect roadside property against fires and explosions on road and rail are discussed. In the second chapter, BLEVEs are recognised as relatively frequent and highly damaging accidents on road and rail. The attention is focussed on predicting two main effects by BLEVE: thermal radiation and projectile impact. Three computational procedures are proposed for assessing thermal and mechanical effects generated of BLEVEs. The first procedure was developed to predict the position of road tanker vessel sustaining a BLEVE with respect to a potential target. The second procedure deals with assessing the thermal radiation of a BLEVE fireball. The third procedure was developed for forecasting the impact of road tanker vessel fragments on roadside object or possible safety barrier. The third chapter formulates a series of proposals to the design of safety barriers aimed at protection of roadside objects against thermal and mechanical effects of BLEVEs on road and rail. The first proposal considers the sitting of barriers in the area of potential deployment. The second proposal deals with a design of a steel barrier intended for a protection of blast loading from a railway tanker BLEVE. The third proposal consists in recommendations of how to design a reinforced concrete barrier capable to sustain impact by fragments from a tanker vessel. All proposals have the form of preliminary, conceptual designs. The main statements of the dissertation were published in twelve scientific articles: four articles – in the Thomson ISI Web of Science register.