Dynamics of Explosions in Cylindrical Vented Enclosures: Validation of a Computational Model by Experiments

Abstract

Recent explosions with devastating consequences have re-emphasized the relevance of fire safety and explosion research. From earlier works, the severity of the explosion has been said to depend on various factors such as the ignition location, type of a combustible mixture, enclosure configuration, and equivalence ratio. Explosion venting has been proposed as a safety measure in curbing explosion impact, and the design of safety vent requires a deep understanding of the explosion phenomenon. To address this, the Explosion Venting Analyzer (EVA)—a mathematical model predicting the maximum overpressure and characterizing the explosion in an enclosure—has been recently developed and coded (Process Saf. Environ. Prot. 99 (2016) 167). The present work is devoted to methane explosions because the natural gas—a common fossil fuel used for various domestic, commercial, and industrial purposes—has methane as its major constituent. Specifically, the dynamics of methane-air explosion in vented cylindrical enclosures is scrutinized, computationally and experimentally, such that the accuracy of the EVA predictions is validated by the experiments, with the Cantera package integrated into the EVA to identify the flame speeds. The EVA results for the rear-ignited vented methane-air explosion show good agreement with the experimental results.

Particulate mass migration and mixing in cylindrically contained explosions

“…Note that the trend in deposition energy between cylinder diameters follows the same general inclination as the impulse of modeled cylindrically contained explosions. [1,4,29,30] The time-to-leak from the imaging (a still depicting a pressure leak is inset into Fig. 2) is used as an approximation of the mixing time that the particles and explosive gases have within the local environment before mass loss causes pressure and energy to escape the system.…”

“…Cylindrical enclosures are ubiquitous in human industrial design. As such, understanding the distribution of mass as it pertains to cylindrically contained explosions is needed for such broad topics as application safety determination Ogunfuye et al, [1] mass migration in underground/contained channels, [2,3] forensic analysis, [4,5] and analysis of debris fields. [6] Explosions contained in cylindrical enclosures have many applications such as food processing, rocket design, resilient armor, geologic and atmospheric migration, and industrial safety in areas such as grain elevators, oil rigs, and mining.…”

“…[6] Explosions contained in cylindrical enclosures have many applications such as food processing, rocket design, resilient armor, geologic and atmospheric migration, and industrial safety in areas such as grain elevators, oil rigs, and mining. [1,[7][8][9][10][11] Contained explosions can generate many particulates, which can be difficult to track; therefore, a surrogate that survives the explosion and retains placement information is needed to help build that understanding base.…”

Application of Factorial Analysis to the Study of Vented Dust Explosions in Large Biomass Storage Silos

“…In this sense, numerical simulations are a powerful tool and allow practitioners and researchers to analyze a wider range of possible initial scenarios. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes have already been successfully applied to dust explosions, including aspects like the turbulent concentration field [28,29], the dust lifting phenomenon [3], interconnected vessels [30,31], the investigation of real accidents [32], and the protection of industrial equipment against dust explosions [11,[33][34][35]; other types of explosions have also been studied by means of CFD simulations [36,37].…”