Open Access

ARTICLE

Numerical Study on the Gas Leakage and Dispersion at the Street Intersection of a Building Group

by Weitao Zhang, Mengqi Liu, Kaiyi Wang, Fan Zhang, Lei Hou

1 National Engineering Laboratory for Pipeline Safety, Beijing Key Laboratory of Urban Oil and Gas Distribution Technology, China University of Petroleum, Beijing, 102249, China.
2 CangHaiBang Business Unit, Supply Chain Business Group, Sinochem Energy High-Tech Co., Ltd., Beijing, 100094, China.
3 Sinopec Economics & Development Research Institute, Beijing, 100029, China.
4 College of Arts and Science, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA.

* Corresponding Author: Lei Hou. Email: .

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Advances in Modeling and Simulation of Complex Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow)

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2020, 123(3), 1247-1266. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmes.2020.09297

Received 30 November 2019; Accepted 11 February 2020; Issue published 28 May 2020

Abstract

Accidents involving natural gas leakage and dispersion pose a significant threat to human life and property. This threat is especially relevant at the street intersection at which dense buildings, heavy traffic flow, and complex underground pipe networks meet. Scholars have conducted numerous studies on gas leakage and dispersion, but investigations of natural gas leakage and dispersion at the street intersection of a building group are not in-depth. In this paper, we presented a three-dimensional (3D) physical model based on the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) methodology to study the natural gas leakage and dispersion at the street intersection of a building group. We validated the CFD methodology applied in the research based on the data from the field tests and wind tunnel experiments. Then, we simulated and analyzed the pressure, wind, and concentration of natural gas dispersion at the street intersection. The simulation results showed that vortex regions, low-pressure zones, and a building group effect could cause a build-up of natural gas concentration under perpendicular wind direction conditions. In addition, the area of hazardous region tended to increase first and then drop with the dispersion height. In the case of this study, the maximum area of hazardous region is 200 m² located in the height of 55 m, which is the middle plane in the computational domain. The results in the paper can provide scientific references for the safe operation and emergency-management decisions of municipal gas.

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