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THE FLARE SYSTEMA GENERAL OVERVIEW |
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In process plants, flares operate to allow the safe disposal of gases, by burning them at an elevated or isolated position, well away from personnel. The gases which flow into the flare system are called relief gases and come from a variety of individual process tanks and pressure vessels. These gases represent an unwanted excess which would cause the tank or vessel to be overloaded and over-pressured in a potentially dangerous manner. Usually, although not in every case, any particular process plant only utilizes a single flare and collects all of the waste gases from the entire plant in a large system of pipes known variously as a flare header, relief header or flare system, in the same manner that a town sewer system collects domestic waste from many households. The overall shape of this system of pipes depends largely on the various geographic locations of the various sources and the pressure available at that source to drive the gases out into the flare. In some plants, the sources may be categorized as "wet" and "dry", "high pressure" and "low pressure", "hot" and "cold" or similar designations. Often, in these cases, gases in one category do not mingle with gases in another category. In some plants the separation is maintained until they have all passed though separate vessels or drums which are intended to remove liquid components. Sources are sometimes also separated in this way to prevent interactions between different processes or parts of a process. |
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