Simulated dispersion of the gas released by the SpaceX Falcon9 rocket explosion

Abstract

This Paper provides a qualitative analysis of the contaminant dispersion caused by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket accident at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 1 September 2016. To achieve this, the Model for Simulating Rocket Exhaust Dispersion and its modeling system were applied to simulate the dispersion of the contaminants emitted during the explosion of the Falcon 9 rocket. This modeling system is a modern tool for risk management and environmental analysis for the evaluation of normal and aborted rocket launch events, being also suitable for the assessment of explosion cases. It deals with the representation of the source term (formation, rising, expansion, and stabilization of the exhaust cloud), the simulation of the short-range dispersion (in the scale from minutestoacouple of hours), and the long-range and chemical transport modeling by integrating with the Community Multiscale Air Quality model and reading meteorological input data from the Weather Research and Forecast model. The results showed that the modeling system captured satisfactorily the phenomenon inside the planetary boundary layer.