Impact Assessments on People and Buildings for Hydrogen Pipeline Explosions

Hydrogen has the potential to act as the energy carrier of the future. It will be then produced in large amounts and will certainly need to be transported for long distances. The safest way to transport hydrogen is through pipelines. Failure of pipelines carrying gaseous hydrogen can have several effects, some of which can pose a significant threat of damage to people and buildings in the immediate proximity of the failure location. This paper presents a probabilistic risk assessment procedure for the estimation of damage to people and buildings endangered by high-pressure hydrogen pipeline explosions. The procedure provides evaluation of annual probability of damage to people and buildings under an extreme event as a combination of the conditional probability of damage triggered by an explosion and the probability of occurrence of the explosion as a consequence of the pipeline failure. Physical features, such as the gas jet release process, flammable cloud size, blast generation, and explosion effects on people and buildings are considered and evaluated through the SLAB integral model, TNO model, Probit equations and Pressure-Impulse diagrams. For people, both direct and indirect effects of overpressure events are considered. For buildings, a comparison of the damage to different types of buildings (i.e. reinforced concrete buildings and tuff stone masonry buildings) is made. The probabilistic procedure presented may be used for designing a new hydrogen pipeline network and will be an advantageous tool for safety management of hydrogen gas pipelines.