ADVANCED CFD AND MODELING OF ACCIDENTAL EXPLOSIONS

This paper reviews the current state of the art in accidental explosion modeling using methods based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in the petrochemical process industries. We discuss the problem in terms of its industrial importance and its technical difficulty, which stems mainly from the large range of length and timescales that must be represented. Explicit representation of all scales is not feasible due to limitations of computational cost, and modeling of unresolved physical features is required. We also discuss geometry modeling using the porosity/distributed resistance (PDR) method and review relevant combustion modeling. We describe an advanced CFD approach using unstructured adaptive gridding and discuss its usefulness in the context of results obtained for both two dimensional and three dimensional simulations of gas explosion phenomena in complex geometries.