Application of CFD(Fluent)to LNG Spills into Geometrically Complex Environments

摘要

Recent discussions;on the fate of LNG spills into impoundments have suggested that the commonly used combination of SOURCE5 and DEGADIS to predict the flammable vapor dispersion distances is not accurate,as it does not account for vapor entrainment by wind.SOURCE5 assumes the vapor layer to grow upward uniformly in the form of a quiescent saturated gas cloud that ultimately spills over impoundment walls.The rate of spillage is then used as the source term for DEGADIS.A more rigorous approach to predict the flammable vapor dispersion distance is to use a computational fluid dynamics(CFD)model.CFD codes can take into account the physical phenomena that govern the fate of LNG spills into impoundments,such as the mixing between air and the evaporated gas.Before a CFD code can be proposed as an alternate method for the prediction of flammable vapor cloud distances,it has to be validated with proper experimental data.