Influence of built-in obstacles on unconfined vapor cloud explosion

Abstract The obstacle structure in the vapor cloud has a significant influence on the gas explosion. Obstacles could not only lead to the acceleration of flame, but also they may occupy some space, thus affecting the amount of combustible gas. In this paper, a new two-step method was proposed to respectively study the effects of the obstacles amount and volume blockage ratio (VBR) on the gas explosion by using Computation Fluid Dynamic software AutoReaGas, and the obstacles in the vapor cloud were set to “Solid” instead of “Subgrid”. Based on the results and analysis, it is found that the peak overpressure and the maximum combustion rate rise with the increase of the number of obstacles for a single VBR, which indicated that the vapor cloud explosion of more obstacles was more dangerous for a single VBR. However, under a single number of obstacles, the peak overpressure and the maximum combustion rate increase firstly and then decrease as VBR increases and reach the highest at the VBR of 0.74, which indicated that the intensity of vapor cloud explosion reach a peak at a certain VBR in the middle instead of the largest. In addition, the existence and structure of obstacles have little effect on the size of explosion fireball when the size and concentration of combustible gas cloud are the same.