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Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "A5: Hydrogen Energy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2023) | Viewed by 7654

Special Issue Editor

Environmental Research Laboratory, National Center for Scientific Research Demokritos, Athens, Greece
Interests: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); fluid mechanics; simulation; turbulence; multiphase flows; heat transfer; dispersion modeling; hydrogen safety; LNG; adrea-hf; fluent

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The climate and energy crisis has led governments to make long-term strategic decisions for effective reduction in carbon emissions within the coming years.  This paves the way to hydrogen and accelerates its introduction to the transportation, shipping, and aviation sectors. This increasing interest in hydrogen technologies and their use as an energy carrier has raised the need to develop an international regulation framework for the inherently safer use of hydrogen. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a valuable tool to perform safety studies and can significantly contribute to the development of regulation, codes, and standards. The outcomes of carefully designed and specially focused studies can assist policy makers and regulatory authorities by providing recommendations regarding safety distances and the efficiency of prevention and mitigation measures.

This Special Issue is dedicated to studying hydrogen-safety-related issues using the CFD methodology but is also interested in the safety of other alternative fuels or hydrogen carriers, such as methane, NH3, etc. The SI topics cover all aspects of safety, including but not limited to vapour dispersion, combustion, and fire modelling. Outstanding research and studies in the relevant disciplinary areas are welcome in this peer-reviewed SI of Energies.

We are inviting and encouraging you to submit your original work to this Special Issue.

Dr. Stella Giannissi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Energies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • computational fluid dynamics
  • hydrogen
  • fuel
  • safety
  • dispersion
  • combustion
  • fire
  • ventilation
  • numerical modeling
  • turbulence
  • LNG
  • ammonia

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

30 pages, 13685 KiB  
Article
Numerical Investigation of Hydrogen Jet Dispersion Below and Around a Car in a Tunnel
by Nektarios Koutsourakis, Ilias C. Tolias, Stella G. Giannissi and Alexandros G. Venetsanos
Energies 2023, 16(18), 6483; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en16186483 - 08 Sep 2023
Viewed by 676
Abstract
Accidental release from a hydrogen car tank in a confined space like a tunnel poses safety concerns. This Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study focuses on the first seconds of such a release, which are the most critical. Hydrogen leaks through a Thermal Pressure [...] Read more.
Accidental release from a hydrogen car tank in a confined space like a tunnel poses safety concerns. This Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study focuses on the first seconds of such a release, which are the most critical. Hydrogen leaks through a Thermal Pressure Relief Device (TPRD), forms a high-speed jet that impinges on the street, spreads horizontally, recirculates under the chassis and fills the area below it in about one second. The “fresh-air entrainment effect” at the back of the car changes the concentrations under the chassis and results in the creation of two “tongues” of hydrogen at the rear corners of the car. Two other tongues are formed near the front sides of the vehicle. In general, after a few seconds, hydrogen starts moving upwards around the car mainly in the form of buoyant blister-like structures. The average hydrogen volume concentrations below the car have a maximum of 71%, which occurs at 2 s. The largest “equivalent stoichiometric flammable gas cloud size Q9” is 20.2 m3 at 2.7 s. Smaller TPRDs result in smaller hydrogen flow rates and smaller buoyant structures that are closer to the car. The investigation of the hydrogen dispersion during the initial stages of the leak and the identification of the physical phenomena that occur can be useful for the design of experiments, for the determination of the TPRD characteristics, for potential safety measures and for understanding the further distribution of the hydrogen cloud in the tunnel. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety)
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21 pages, 24477 KiB  
Article
Validation and Verification of containmentFOAM CFD Simulations in Hydrogen Safety
by Khaled Yassin, Stephan Kelm, Manohar Kampili and Ernst-Arndt Reinecke
Energies 2023, 16(16), 5993; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en16165993 - 15 Aug 2023
Viewed by 648
Abstract
As the applications of hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels and energy storage increase, more concerns have been raised regarding its safe usage. Hydrogen’s extreme physical properties—its lower flammability limit (LFL), for instance—represent a challenge to simulating hydrogen leakage and, hence, mitigating [...] Read more.
As the applications of hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuels and energy storage increase, more concerns have been raised regarding its safe usage. Hydrogen’s extreme physical properties—its lower flammability limit (LFL), for instance—represent a challenge to simulating hydrogen leakage and, hence, mitigating accidents that occur due to such leakage. In this work, the OpenFOAM-based CFD simulation package containmentFOAM was validated by different experimental results. As in its original use, to simulate nuclear safety issues, the containmentFOAM package is capable of capturing different phenomena, like buoyant gas clouds and diffusion between gases and air. Despite being widely validated in nuclear safety, this CFD package was assessed with benchmark experiments used to validate hydrogen leakage scenarios. The validation cases were selected to cover different phenomena that occur during the hydrogen leakage—high-speed jet leakage, for example. These validation cases were the hallway with vent, FLAME, and GAMELAN experiments. From the comparison of the experimental and simulation results, we concluded that the containmentFOAM package showed good consistency with the experimental results and, hence, that it can be used to simulate actual leakage cases. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety)
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15 pages, 5136 KiB  
Article
Simulations for Planning of Liquid Hydrogen Spill Test
by Kevin Mangala Gitushi, Myra Blaylock and Ethan S. Hecht
Energies 2023, 16(4), 1580; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en16041580 - 04 Feb 2023
Viewed by 1086
Abstract
In order to better understand the complex pooling and vaporization of a liquid hydrogen spill, Sandia National Laboratories is conducting a highly instrumented, controlled experiment inside their Shock Tube Facility. Simulations were run before the experiment to help with the planning of experimental [...] Read more.
In order to better understand the complex pooling and vaporization of a liquid hydrogen spill, Sandia National Laboratories is conducting a highly instrumented, controlled experiment inside their Shock Tube Facility. Simulations were run before the experiment to help with the planning of experimental conditions, including sensor placement and cross wind velocity. This paper describes the modeling used in this planning process and its main conclusions. Sierra Suite’s Fuego, an in-house computational fluid dynamics code, was used to simulate a RANS model of a liquid hydrogen spill with five crosswind velocities: 0.45, 0.89, 1.34, 1.79, and 2.24 m/s. Two pool sizes were considered: a diameter of 0.85 m and a diameter of 1.7. A grid resolution study was completed on the smaller pool size with a 1.34 m/s crosswind. A comparison of the length and height of the plume of flammable hydrogen vaporizing from the pool shows that the plume becomes longer and remains closer to the ground with increasing wind speed. The plume reaches the top of the facility only in the 0.45 m/s case. From these results, we concluded that it will be best for the spacing and location of the concentration sensors to be reconfigured for each wind speed during the experiment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety)
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19 pages, 3978 KiB  
Article
Blowout Prediction on a Salt Cavern Selected for a Hydrogen Storage Pilot
by Hippolyte Djizanne, Carlos Murillo Rueda, Benoit Brouard, Pierre Bérest and Grégoire Hévin
Energies 2022, 15(20), 7755; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en15207755 - 20 Oct 2022
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1929
Abstract
To prevent climate change, Europe and the world must shift to low-carbon and renewable energies. Hydrogen, as an energy vector, provides viable solutions for replacing polluting and carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Gaseous hydrogen can be stored underground and coupled with existing natural gas pipe [...] Read more.
To prevent climate change, Europe and the world must shift to low-carbon and renewable energies. Hydrogen, as an energy vector, provides viable solutions for replacing polluting and carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Gaseous hydrogen can be stored underground and coupled with existing natural gas pipe networks. Salt cavern storage is the best suited technology to meet the challenges of new energy systems. Hydrogen storage caverns are currently operated in the UK and Texas. A preliminary risk analysis dedicated to underground hydrogen salt caverns highlighted the importance of containment losses (leaks) and the formation of gas clouds following blowouts, whose ignition may generate dangerous phenomena such as jet fires, unconfined vapor cloud explosions (UVCEs), or flashfires. A blowout is not a frequent accident in gas storage caverns. A safety valve is often set at a 30 m depth below ground level; it is automatically triggered following a pressure drop at the wellhead. Nevertheless, a blowout remains to be one of the significant accidental scenarios likely to occur during hydrogen underground storage in salt caverns. In this paper, we present modelling the subterraneous and aerial parts of a blowout on an EZ53 salt cavern fully filled with hydrogen. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety)
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12 pages, 4131 KiB  
Article
Modeling and Analysis of the Flow Characteristics of Liquid Hydrogen in a Pipe Suffering from External Transient Impact
by Yuanliang Liu, Yinan Qiu, Zhan Liu and Gang Lei
Energies 2022, 15(11), 4154; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/en15114154 - 05 Jun 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2328
Abstract
Pipes can be subjected to external transient impacts such as accidental collision, which affects the safe operation of storage and transportation systems for liquid hydrogen. Fluid–structure coupling calculation for a pipe under external transient impact is performed, and the flow characteristics of liquid [...] Read more.
Pipes can be subjected to external transient impacts such as accidental collision, which affects the safe operation of storage and transportation systems for liquid hydrogen. Fluid–structure coupling calculation for a pipe under external transient impact is performed, and the flow characteristics of liquid hydrogen in the pipe are analyzed. The pipe deforms and vibrates when suffering from external transient impact. Liquid hydrogen pressure in a cross-section plane increases along the pipe deformation direction. Additionally, external transient impact enhances the disturbance of liquid hydrogen near the pipe wall. The increased flow resistance and the energy induced by the deformed pipe both affect the flow of liquid hydrogen, and contribute to the fluctuated characteristics of liquid pressure drop. In addition, the phase state of liquid hydrogen remains unchanged in the pipe, indicating that little of the induced energy is transformed into the internal energy of liquid hydrogen. The work provides theoretical guidance for the safe operation of liquid hydrogen storage and transportation systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Computational Fluid Dynamics Applied to Hydrogen Safety)
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