Quantifying the impacts of typical environmental factors on oil depot fire and explosion risk

Climate change poses new requirements for fire risk assessment, necessitating methods to quantify the impacts of environmental factors. As a high fire and explosion risk place, crude oil depot, typically exposed to open air, is highly susceptible to such factors. However, conventional risk assessment frameworks usually overlook the quantitative characterization of environmental factors' impacts. Furthermore, existing single-method frameworks are generally inadequate for quantitatively capturing complex and dynamic relationships between environmental factors and risk levels. In response, this study developed a risk assessment method that enabled the quantification of typical environmental factors’ impacts on oil depot fire and explosion risk. Specifically, the method quantified impacts through these pathways that are air temperature-driven, increasing human error probabilities and relative humidity-dependent electrostatic sparks events. To achieve this, the method synergistically combined fault tree analysis, cloud model theory, and information diffusion technique. The results indicated that oil depot fire and explosion risk exhibited a parabolic curve opening upward against air temperature, reaching its minimum at 20 °C. In contrast, the risk decreased monotonically with increasing relative humidity. It was also known that the impacts of relative humidity were relatively much smaller than those from the air temperature, which can be ignored during the analysis of oil depot fire and explosion risk. In practical application, the assessment results support the development of a predictive risk chart, facilitating real-time risk forecasting and enabling customization based on regional climatic conditions. Under the background of climate change, the developed method fulfills the critical demand for reliable risk assessment under evolving weather conditions.