Fuel gas pipeline venting issue
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According to the fire protection design codes for petrochemical enterprises, vent pipelines should be located above the operating platforms or building roofs within a 20-m radius. So, does a boiler room with a height of 60 meters count as a building? Must the vent pipeline be higher than the roof of the boiler room? Someone from a design institute asked me whether air could flow back into the vent line when the valve on that line is opened for venting. I haven’t encountered any danger in practice, but how can this issue be explained theoretically? For this reason, the design institute asked me to replace the vent pipeline’s pneumatic cut-off valve with a manual valve, but it seems that this does not solve the problem
A boiler room definitely belongs to a building. You can’t continuously release fuel gas into the atmosphere, right? It should only be needed during startup and shutdown. This doesn’t even qualify as “intermittent” emissions; if it did, it would be within a range of 10 meters. Moreover, the wording is “not advisable,” rather than “mandatory.”