Predicting radiative characteristics of hydrogen and hydrogen/methane jet fires using FireFOAM

Abstract

A possible consequence of pressurized hydrogen release is an under-expanded jet fire. Knowledge of the flame length, radiative heat flux as well as the effects of variations in ground reflectance is important for safety assessment. The present study applies an open source CFD code FireFOAM to study the radiation characteristics of hydrogen and hydrogen/methane jet fires. For combustion, the eddy dissipation concept for multi-component fuels recently developed by the authors in the large eddy simulation (LES) framework is used. The radiative heat is computed with the finite volume discrete ordinates model in conjunction with the weighted sum of grey gas model for the absorption/emission coefficient. The pseudo-diameter approach is used in which the corresponding parameters are calculated using the formulations of Birch et al. [24] with the thermodynamic properties corrected by the Able-Noble equation of state. The predicted flame length and radiant fraction are in good agreement with the measurements of Schefer et al. [2], Studer et al. [3] and Ekoto et al. [6]. In order to account for the effects of variation in ground surface reflectance, the emissivity of hydrogen flames was modified following Ekoto et al. [6]. Four cases with different ground reflectance are computed. The predictions show that the ground surface reflectance only has minor effect on the surface emissive power of the smaller hydrogen jet fire of Ekoto et al. [6]. The radiant fractions fluctuate from 0.168 to 0.176 close to the suggested value of 0.16 by Ekoto et al. [6] based on the analysis of their measurements.