Effect of seals on evaporation loss from the Khark Island crude oil storage tanks

فاقد چكيده

Evaporation loss is common in all branches of the petroleum industries. Studying evaporation loss is important especially for companies which store organic liquid. Storing organic liquid in tanks for long time lead to evaporating liquid and subsequently is lost to the atmosphere. This loss reduces organic liquid quality and causes atmospheric pollutant. Crude oil is one of the primary organic materials which widely being used in world. Therefore, crude oil evaporation loss is an important issue which should be carefully investigated and effects of various parameters be studied. In this paper, the effect of seal type on the evaporation loss has been investigated and determined. Further evaporate loss from rim seals for the Khark Island storage tanks are compared. Nine types of the primary/secondary seal configurations have been studied. To be able to determine the loss, the API AP-42 standard has been employed as a main tool. The standard needs careful evaluating atmospheric conditions including wind speed and especially solar radiations. For this reason, solar radiation has been calculated in Khark Island. The climatic data for Khark Island has been taken from the Iran Weather Institute for 2006. The results unveiled that one type of the primary/secondary seal configuration has advantages over the other configurations in preventing evaporative loss.