CFD calculations of gas leak dispersion and subsequent gas explosions: Validation against ignited impinging hydrogen jet experiments

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools are increasingly employed for quantifying incident consequences in quantitative risk analysis (QRA) calculations in the process industry. However, these tools must be validated against representative experimental data, involving combined release and ignition scenarios, in order to have a real predictive capability. Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe (FZK) has recently carried out experiments involving vertically upwards hydrogen releases with different release rates and velocities impinging on a plate in two different geometrical configurations. The dispersed cloud was subsequently ignited and resulting explosion overpressures recorded. Blind CFD simulations were carried out prior to the experiments to predict the results. The simulated gas concentrations are found to correlate reasonably well with observations. The overpressures subsequent to ignition obtained in the blind predictions could not be compared directly as the ignition points chosen in the experiments were somewhat different from those used in the blind simulations, but the pressure levels were similar. Simulations carried out subsequently with the same ignition position as those in the experiments compared reasonably well with the observations. This agreement points to the ability of the CFD tool FLACS to model such complex scenarios even with hydrogen as a fuel. Nevertheless, the experimental set-up can be considered to be small-scale. Future large-scale data of this type will be valuable to confirm ability to predict large-scale accident scenarios.