Thermal and fire characteristics of hydrogen jet flames in the tunnel at longitudinal ventilation strategies

Abstract Hydrogen leakage of vehicles in the tunnel is a great threat to the safety operation of the tunnel and longitudinal ventilation strategies have always been utilized to control the fire and smoke movement of rail transit, electric and fossil-fueled vehicles in the engineering field. It is in doubt whether the longitudinal ventilation strategy could still help to reduce the jet fire hazard of transportation with H2 power in the tunnel, considering the rapid development of the hydrogen energy. In present work, a numerical research on effects of longitudinal ventilation strategies on hydrogen jet flames in the tunnel is conducted. The results illustrate that longitudinal ventilation could affect the flame characteristics of jet flames greatly in the tunnel. The critical ventilation velocity increases firstly with the increase of hydrogen leakage rates and then changes little after a critical value. The predicted theoretical model of pool fires could well predict the critical ventilation velocity for hydrogen jet fires. With the increase of longitudinal ventilation velocity, maximum ceiling temperatures are decreased greatly. According to the heat releases, jet speeds and ventilation velocities, three kinds of flame bending characteristics of hydrogen jet fire could be observed due to different effects of the inertial force. At last, the stable thermal stratification could also be destroyed by large ventilation velocities but the corresponding ventilation velocity is far larger than the critical ventilation one. With the increase of longitudinal ventilation velocities, the height of thermal layer is reduced firstly and then maintained at a constant value.