Tags:accidental release, CFD, high-pressure jet, obstacle and Risk analysis
Abstract:
Methane is widespread for storage and transport practical reasons and is commonly used in industrial plants in gaseous form in their applications: accidental high-pressure unignited jets (methane) is a typical scenario investigated during industrial risk assessment. Considering a typical industrial plant, it is common that flammable gas release scenarios could affect one or more obstacles like buildings or equipment (e.g., columns, tanks, pipe rack, etc.) around the leak. When a flammable gas release interacts with an obstacle, its behavior can significantly change the relevant damage areas, as demonstrated by historical accidental experience and literature recent works (Bénard et al., 2016(1), Colombini and Busini, 2019(2)). The study of the behavior and effects, in terms of safety of a high-pressure jet affecting one or more obstacles inside an industrial plant, is not so common in literature. This work investigates how a series of obstacles in different configuration influence the jet cloud extent and, consequently, the hazardous areas. Varying the dimension, the shape and the relative position of the obstacles, the effect of the flow involving multi-obstacles was systematically studied through an extensive Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. For different methane releases, in terms of upstream pressure and accidental hole size, the main achievement of this work is a simple criterion, able to derive engineering correlations of practical use and determine the limits of influence on the jet of multi-obstacles. The situations in which a specific obstacle of the scenario inside an industrial plant does not influence the high-pressure methane jet behavior are also identified, therefore simplifying models and/or geometries during a CFD simulation.
Multi-Obstacles Influence on High-Pressure Methane Jets