A Study on Natural Gas Dispersion Modeling for Gas Safety Platform Development

Abstract

© 2017 SERSC Australia. When an accident involving a gas leak happens, soon the leaked gas begins to disperse at high speed into the air. The gas cloud may have a diameter of a few kilometers according to the leakage conditions such as gas type, ambient conditions, and leakage velocity. Especially, Gas clouds made of combustible gases have wide ranges of damage by fire or gas explosion. Natural gas belonging to combustible gases also may have very wide ranges of damage because the ethane gas, as a main element of natural gas, is lighter and faster than other gases. For this reason, the calculation of the natural gas dispersion is essential for the development of Gas Safety Platform. Korea Gas Safety Corporation is developing a gas safety platform which is able to predict gas accident risks by a risk assessment system. The most important factor of the risk decision is to predict damage ranges from fire and explosion scenario. And the fire and explosion damage calculation begins from gas dispersion modeling. This paper introduces methods for ethane gas dispersion modeling with Gaussian dispersion equations. Also, various numerical methods are recommended for efficiently calculating Gaussian equations.