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Research Article

Numerical simulations on explosion of leaked liquefied petroleum gas in a garage

Y.W. Ng1, Y. Huo1, Wan-ki Chow1( ), C.L. Chow2, F.M. Cheng3
Department of Building Services Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
School of Safety Science and Engineering, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an, China
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Abstract

An explosion while repairing liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) taxis in a garage located at the ground level of an old residential building constructed in Hong Kong was reported in 2015. Part of the building structures was damaged with the owners staying inside killed. The cause of explosion is still under investigation, but the explosion source can be due to leaking of LPG fuel or flammable clean refrigerants with LPG. A taxi has over 0.5 kg of refrigerant HFC134a (R134a) stored in the air-conditioning unit. A pressure rise exceeding 21 kPa (or 0.21 bar) due to explosion from a small amount of LPG would give damages to the building. As firefighters are always exposing themselves to the risk of explosion when they are carrying out rescue operation in a gas-filled environment, the explosion overpressure has to be more reliably estimated for working out protection schemes during operation. This garage LPG explosion incident was studied numerically using Computational Fluid Dynamics software FLame ACceleration Simulation (FLACS). Three scenarios of different LPG-air mixture volumes and LPG concentrations were investigated. Dispersion of LPG was simulated first with an ignition taken at a position at the garage centre. Overpressure and temperature rise were predicted using a fine grid system with 1 657 600 computing cells was employed. Results were compared with numerical predictions using coarse grids of 207 200 cells. Discussion and conclusions were made with reference to the threshold value of 21 kPa in overpressure.

Keywords

explosionconcentrationmixture volumetransient overpressures

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Building Simulation
Volume 10 Issue 5,
October 2017
Pages 755-768
DOI: 10.1007/s12273-017-0366-z
Cite this article:
Ng Y, Huo Y, Chow W-k, et al. Numerical simulations on explosion of leaked liquefied petroleum gas in a garage. Building Simulation, 2017, 10(5): 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12273-017-0366-z

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Received: 02 December 2016
Revised: 13 February 2017
Accepted: 02 March 2017
Published: 12 April 2017
© Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2017
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