Nowadays, the statistical studies have revealed that major accidents (MA) are frequent in diverse industries, which has originated the development of strategies and normative focussed in foreseeing and preventing these. Thus, the process safety is in continuous improvement. The experimental studies in this field result in situations of high risks and are usually expensive. Therefore, the implementation of developments as the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques is now applied, and has proven to be advantageous. In this work, CFD models for pool and jet fires are presented, as these kinds of fires are usually involved in major accidents. The results of the CFD models show orders of magnitude and behaviors in good agreement with experimental observations found in literature. The outputs of the simulations showed values of around 500 and 1400 K for the pool fires; while the jet fires predictions were of temperatures around 500 and 1050 K. Furthermore, the information obtained by these models can be used in order to develop safety plans to diminish risks in the facilities designs, safe zones and emergency exit routes.
Part of the book: Computational Fluid Dynamics
Many of the engineering problems have multiphysics and multiscale nature. Non-isothermal flows, stirred reactors, turbulent mixing and membrane filtration, are prevalent cases in which the coupling of several physics phenomena is required for the adequate prediction of overall behaviors. Also, a multiscale analysis, where the same phenomenon is analyzed at different scales, can lead to better understanding of the phenomena, which can be used in optimization and to provide adequate scale-up methodologies. Studies incorporating both multiscale and multiphysics analysis are rarely addressed in literature; in fact, these kinds of problems will be the research challenge in the next years. Computer fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques have shown to be promising to deal with these kinds of systems. In this chapter, these are used to implement a multiscale analysis of the hydrodesulphurization (HDS) process for light gas-oil (LGO). The aforementioned is carried out by the analysis of mass an energy transport at: (1) microporous (MP) scale, (2) pseudo-homogeneous catalyst (PHC) scale, and by analysis of (3) momentum and mass transport at reactor scale (RS). In addition, a particular discussion is made regarding the proper establishment of the model, its validation, the use of different boundary conditions, its justification; and the dependence of solutions of parameters and initial and boundary conditions.
Part of the book: Computational Fluid Dynamics