A new equivalent method to obtain the stoichiometric fuel-air cloud from the inhomogeneous cloud based on FLACS-dispersion

The fuel-air cloud resulting from an accidental discharge event is normally irregular in shape and varying in concentration. Performance of dispersion simulations using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based tool FLACS can get an uneven and irregular cloud. For the performance of gas explosion study with FLACS, the equivalent stoichiometric fuel-air cloud concept is widely applied to get a representative distribution of explosion loads. The Q9 cloud model that is employed in FLACS is an equivalent fuel-air cloud representation, in which the laminar burning velocity with first order SL and volume expansion ratio are taken into consideration. However, during an explosion in congested areas, the main part of the combustion involves turbulent flame propagation. Hence, to give a more reasonable equivalent fuel-air size, the turbulent burning velocity must be taken into consideration. The paper presents a new equivalent cloud method using the turbulent burning velocity, which is described as a function of SL, deduced from the TNO multi-energy method.