APRIL 26, 2015
BELL, CALIFORNIA
A tanker truck carrying 8,500 gallons of gasoline caught
fire, causing a closure of the north and southbound 710 Freeway in Bell on
Sunday afternoon, officials said.
The fire was reported on the 710 Freeway near Florence
Avenue, Los Angeles County Fire Department officials said around 3:45 p.m.
The truck was carrying about 8,500 gallons of gasoline, the department
tweeted. Flames were extinguished by 4:54 p.m. but the roadway remained closed.
BandiniFire Update: IC Reports fire is contained. Tanker was
carrying 8500 gal of gasoline. No injuries reported. pic.twitter.com/sgYlCkNYte
— LACounty Fire PIO (@LACoFDPIO) April 26, 2015
No injuries were reported, and more than 50 firefighters
were deployed to battle the blaze, supervising dispatcher Cheryl Sims with the
fire department told the Los Angeles Times.
Motorists were trapped on the freeway for nearly an hour,
but around 4:30 p.m. southbound traffic was diverted onto Bandini Boulevard and
northbound drivers were led off Florence Avenue, the CHP tweeted.
The north and southbound sides of the freeway would remain
closed for an unknown amount of time, the California Highway
Patrol tweeted.
Photos showed the tanker truck had overturned, and no other
vehicles appeared to be involved in the crash.
Plumes of dark smoke billowed into the air as dozens of
parked vehicles appeared to be stuck on the roadway, images on social media
showed.
KTLA viewers reported seeing the smoke from as far away as
Silver Lake.
Source: ktla.com
THE ROLLOVER RISK OF
TRUCKS: EVASIVE OR SUDDEN MOVES WILL RESULT IN ROLLOVER OF THE TRUCK
THE ROLLOVER
RISKS OF TWO-TANK TANKERS ARE TOO GREAT TO CONTINUE TO ALLOW THEM CARRYING
HAZARDOUS MATERIALS WITHOUT ADDITIONAL SAFETY MEASURES
The recent
rollover of a two-car tanker in Los Angeles reminds how dangerous these
two-tank tankers are for carrying flammable liquids.
The fluid
slosh can definitely throw you around if you're not expecting it. You have to
be smooth with your inputs. If the
driver was being stupid/distracted/whatever he could have easily steered/braked
too quickly and caused the slosh to tip him over.
Tankers are
actually the hardest commercial vehicle to control. Any tanker that has to be completely cleaned
out between loads cannot have baffles. Imagine the kind of things that would
grow in a tanker full of milk if you could never wash it out. There are also
still older tankers out there that move things such as fuel that have baffles
today, but did not always have them in the past.
No question its the driver's fault, but he really could have had some surging that contributed to the incident.
No question its the driver's fault, but he really could have had some surging that contributed to the incident.
Dynamic Stability of a Vehicle Carrying Bulk Liquid and Driving Over a Bump
In this project, we simulate sloshing in a tanker truck driving over a bump. The truck is moving at 10 m/s and drives over a bump 40 cm high. The suspension system of the truck absorbs the initial displacement due to the bump and transfers the generated forces to the structure of the truck. The suspension system is composed of two linear springs with different spring constants. The 3D rigid-body dynamic equations are coupled to the finite element formulation of the flow problem and solved simultaneously for the motion of the tanker truck as function of time. The fluid dynamics equations are written in a non-inertial frame to account for this motion. The finite element mesh used consists of 343,560 hexahedral elements and 357,911 nodes. At each time-step, a coupled system of nonlinear equations with 1,704,661 unknowns is solved. The computation was carried out on a CRAY T3E with 32 processors. The frames below show, at different instants, the motion of the truck, sloshing, and fluid pressure. For additional information on sloshing in tanker trucks, see "Sloshing in a Container Subjected to Sudden Deceleration".
The mesh generator and flow solver were developed by the T*AFSM.
References:
1. T.J.R. Hughes, T.E. Tezduyar and A.N. Brooks, "Streamline Upwind Formulations for Advection-Diffusion, Navier-Stokes, and First-order Hyperbolic Equations", Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Finite Element Methods in Fluid Flow, University of Tokyo Press, Tokyo (1982).2. T.E. Tezduyar and D.K. Ganjoo, "Petrov-Galerkin Formulations with Weighting Functions Dependent Upon Spatial and Temporal Discretization: Applications to Transient Convection-Diffusion Problems", Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 59 (1986) 49-71.
3. T.E. Tezduyar and J. Liou, "Adaptive Implicit-Explicit Finite Element Algorithms for Fluid Mechanics Problems", Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 78 (1990) 165-179.
4. T.E. Tezduyar, "Stabilized Finite Element Formulations for Incompressible Flow Computations", Advances in Applied Mechanics, 28 (1991) 1-44.
5. T.E. Tezduyar, S. Mittal, S.E. Ray and R. Shih, "Incompressible Flow Computations with Stabilized Bilinear and Linear Equal-order-interpolation Velocity-Pressure Elements", Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 95 (1992) 221-242.
6. T. Tezduyar, "Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling", Flow Simulation with the Finite Element Method (in Japanese), Springer-Verlag, Tokyo, Japan (1998).
7. T. Tezduyar, S. Aliabadi and M. Behr, "Parallel Finite Element Computing Methods for Unsteady Flows with Interfaces", Computational Fluid Dynamics Review 1998 (eds. M. Hafez and K. Oshima), World Scientific (1998) 643-667.
8. T. Tezduyar, "CFD Methods for Three-Dimensional Computation of Complex Flow Problems", Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics, 81 (1999) 97-116.
9. T. Tezduyar and Y. Osawa, "Methods for Parallel Computation of Complex Flow Problems", Parallel Computing, 25 (1999) 2039-2066.