Abstract
In the industrial safety framework, high-pressure jets involving toxic or flammable substances represent one of the major risks. The presence of one or more obstacles affects the extent of the plume, normally to higher dimensions, which means that an open field modeling would not be conservative and that it is necessary to explicitly consider the obstacles effects. Thus, to study this kind of scenario, only a computational fluid dynamic model allows a complete and proper description of the obstacles influence on the jet behavior.
In this work, we deal with a realistic case-study of industrial interest which involves a high-pressure methane jet impinging a nearby cylindrical tank positioned in front of the jet release.
The aims of this work are to define the geometrical parameters of the scenario, to quantify their influence on the jet-obstacle interaction, with respect to the free jet case, and then to find which of them are the most relevant. Therefore, the effect of the cylindrical tank on the lower flammability limit area extent is systematically studied using computational fluid dynamics simulations, performed with ANSYS FLUENT.
