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.