Effect of Wind Speed on Fire-Induced Domino Effects in Chemical Tank Farms

Abstract Wind redistributes pool-fire radiation among ordered source-receptor links, altering thermal-failure sequences and accident-state accumulation. We developed a reduced-order framework linking wind conditions, directional heat flux, multisource thermal load, TTF/Probit transformation, and DBN recursion. The same physical inputs are organized in two complementary analytical representations: stage-total heat fluxes for deterministic stage-sequence and ablation analyses, and complete directed source-receptor matrices for CPT construction, DBN recursion, and propagation-path analysis. The six-tank case combines 61 wind-speed nodes from 0 to 60 at 1 m/s intervals, 13 stage-response nodes at 5 m/s intervals, seven complete 6 × 6 matrices, and 10/20 m/s piecewise-steady sequences. At 10 m/s, multisource loading reduces the L2-L4 conditional TTFs to 37.5, 68.2, and 34.0% of the strongest-source values. The two representations differ by less than 1% for the key receptors and both rank A6 > A4 > A5. Applying the 20 m/s CPTs in the early rather than the late sequence increases terminal A6 probability by a factor of 1.74. From s* = 10 to 60, A6 probability rises from 4.79 × 10–5 to 0.006072, while the probability-dominant propagation-path class accounts for 57.12–61.73% of the conditional mass. The 5.24 min first-escalation time and 12.52 min full-chain time translate these results into emergency-action windows.