DISPERSION STUDY OF HYDROGEN GAS RELEASE VIA PIPELINE NETWORK USING COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMIC APPROACH

Use of hydrogen is continually growing and there will be widespread of plants installation with high capacity storage. For the next few years, use ofhydrogen will be demanding in the context ofhydrogen economy. For economical reason, huge amount of hydrogen will be produced in large scale facilities and most likely distributed via pipeline network. Hydrogen has the widest explosive or ignition mix range in air where a in certain critical condition it may lead to an explosion. Hence, a high-momentum release likely to produce huge amount of thermal energy to be released into the environment. Thus, it is crucial to study the resulted consequences of high-momentum of hydrogen accidental release via pipeline. By using a FLUENT-CFD tool, it considers various kind ofturbulence and dissipation model of hydrogen on the dispersion process. In this paper, realizable k-epsilon model will be used as it ability to provide superior performance for flows involving rotation, boundary layers under strong adverse pressure gradients, separation, and recirculation. The aim of this paper is to study the hazard region from release of hydrogen by encountering two parameters that affect the dispersion process which refers to wind velocity and obstacle. From the result, wind speed affects the flammability limit region of hydrogen-air mixture at certain extent. The result ofthe simulated model will be compared with the experimental data conducted by Hydrogen Pipe Break Test (HPBT) as a validation ofhydrogen dispersion model