Effect of Air and Sea Surface Temperatures on Liquefied Natural Gas Dispersion

A computational fluid dynamics code was used for modeling the complete spill and dispersion process of liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the Falcon 1 test, which has stable conditions, low wind speeds, and large spill volume and flow rate, in addition to the presence of an obstacle in the flow domain. The simulation results have good agreement with experimental data and can accurately capture the vapor cloud dispersion process. The model was then used to investigate the effect of air and sea surface temperatures on LNG spill and vapor cloud dispersion. The results show that an increase in the temperature has little effect on the initial growth rate of the LNG pool (0-50 s). However, as the LNG discharge rate starts to decrease (similar to 50-400 s), the effect of the increasing temperature becomes more apparent, with the pool size decreasing. Overall, this leads to a significant increase in downwind dispersion (by up to 26%) accompanied by a slight decrease in lateral dispersion (by up to 6%) and a slight increase in the vertical dispersion (by up to 5%). The prediction also shows that the sea surface temperatures have a greater impact on the dispersion process than that of air.