Ground influence on high-pressure methane jets: Practical tools for risk assessment

High-pressure gaseous methane release is a relevant safety-related problem mainly in the Oil and Gas industry. As well documented, the reason for these safety concerns is connected with the severe consequences of the domino effect subsequent to the possible ignition. In risk assessment activities, estimation of the damage area is of primary importance in order to draw up proper safety guidelines. To do this, loss prevention specialists use quick and well-established numerical tools (i.e., integral models) in their daily activities. However, the presence of an obstacle in the flow field of the jet (e.g., the ground) is a more probable situation to deal with. It is known that integral models fail in this kind of scenario, leading to unreliable predictions. Hence, the present work investigates how an industrial ground surface influences the LFL cloud size of a horizontal high-pressure methane jet. An innovative quick procedure is proposed allowing to determine the height below which the ground begins to influence the LFL cloud size and the extent of such influence. Therefore, this procedure allows practitioners to establish when integral models can be used and when not to use them, and also provides a simple and reliable alternative to their use. These analytical instruments are derived from an extensive computational fluid dynamics analysis performed with Ansys Fluent 19.0.