Simulation of High-pressure Liquid Hydrogen Releases

Sandia National Laboratories is working with stakeholders to develop scientific data for use by standards development organizations to create hydrogen codes and standards for the safe use of liquid hydrogen. Knowledge of the concentration field and flammability envelope for high-pressure hydrogen leaks is an issue of importance for the safe use of liquid hydrogen. Sandia National Laboratories is engaged in an experimental and analytical program to characterize and predict the behaviour of liquid hydrogen releases. This paper presents a model for computing hydrogen dilution distances for cold hydrogen releases. Model validation is presented for leaks of room temperature and 80 K high-pressure hydrogen gas. The model accounts for a series of transitions that occurs from a stagnate location in the tank to a point in the leak jet where the concentration of hydrogen in air at the jet centerline has dropped to 4% by volume. The leaking hydrogen is assumed to be a simple compressible substance with thermodynamic equilibrium between hydrogen vapor, hydrogen liquid and air. For the multi-phase portions of the jet near the leak location the REFPROP equation of state models developed by NIST are used to account for the thermodynamics. Further downstream, the jet develops into an atmospheric gas jet where the thermodynamics are described as a mixture of ideal gases (hydrogen–air mixture). Simulations are presented for dilution distances in under-expanded high-pressure leaks from the saturated vapor and saturated liquid portions of a liquid hydrogen storage tank at 10.34 barg (150 PSIG).