Review of Methods For Estimating the Overpressure and Impulse Resulting From a Hydrogen Explosion in a Confined/Obstructed Volume

This study deals with the TNO Multi-Energy and Baker-Strehlow-Tang (BST) methods for estimating the positive overpressures and positive impulses resulting from hydrogen-air explosions. With these two methods, positive overpressure and positive impulse results depend greatly on the choice of the class number for the TNO Multi-Energy method or the Mach number for the BST methods. These two factors permit the user to read the reduced parameters of the blast wave from the appropriate monographs for each of these methods, i.e., positive overpressure and positive duration phase for the TNO Multi-Energy method, and positive overpressure and positive impulse for the BST methods. However, for the TNO Multi-Energy method, the determination of the class number is not objective because it is the user who makes the final decision in choosing the class number, whereas, with the BST methods, the user is strongly guided in their choice of an appropriate Mach number. These differences in the choice of these factors can lead to very different results in terms of positive overpressure and positive impulse. Therefore, the objective of this work was to compare the positive overpressures and positive impulses predicted with the TNO Multi-Energy and BST methods with data available from large-scale experiments.