Experimental study of the effects of vent geometry on the dispersion of a buoyant gas in a small enclosure

•Experiments on dispersion of helium in an enclosure without ventilation.•Study of the effects of injection velocity and flow rate.•Build-up regimes: stratified, stratified with homogeneous layer and fully homogeneous.•Parameter proposal to estimate the conditions for transition from one to another of these regimes.

We present an experimental study on the dispersion of helium in an enclosure of 1 m3 with natural ventilation through one vent. Three vent geometries have been studied. Injection parameters have been varied so that the injection Richardson number ranges from 2·10−6 to 9 and the volume Richardson number, which gives the ability of the release to mix the enclosure content ranges from 8·10−4 to 900. It has been found that the vertical distribution of helium volume fraction can exhibit significant gradient. Nevertheless, the results are compared to the simple analytical model based on the homogenous mixture hypothesis which gives fairly good estimates of the maximum helium volume fraction.