Propagation phenomena of spherically expanding hydrogen-air premixed flames; Simulation by a public open source code

Thwe Thwe, A.  ; Terada, Atsuhiko  ; Hino, Ryutaro; Nagaishi, Ryuji ; Kadowaki, Satoshi

For long-term safe storage of fuel debris from hydrogen (H) explosion, the development of simulation codes for H behaviors is important. In this simulation, propagation of H-air premixed flames was reproduced by using a public open source code OpenFOAM. Not only default solver but also modified one based on a new laminar flame speed model derived from the experiments at Nagaoka University of Technology were applied. Three-dimensional 1/8 of cubic shaped vessels with two sizes of 0.21m and 0.13m in length were modeled with mesh sizes of 0.625mm and 0.5mm, respectively. H-air mixture with a unity equivalence ratio, temperature 298K and pressure 101,325Pa was used. The flames propagated spherically and the propagation phenomena had good agreement with the experimental results within 0.005s. The wrinkle flame shape appeared in the smaller model was more likely with that observed in the experiments. This is because mesh size has influence on the wrinkle shape formation in the simulations.