This work concerns the modelling of scenarios for a residential hydrogen refuelling system. Such a system is under construction within the Engineering Safe and Compact Hydrogen Energy Reserves (ESCHER) project. Non-reacting and reacting simulations are compared against experimental data before being applied to a residential garage scenario. The non-reacting simulations utilise natural ventilation, which utilises the natural buoyancy of hydrogen and vent locations to disperse flammable mixtures. This is favoured over mechanical ventilation, which could fail. The non-reacting work focuses on investigating the most suitable venting configuration for a release of hydrogen from a refuelling system located within a residential garage. Different vent configurations are examined initially before proceeding to take into account atmospheric conditions, wind, and the presence of a vehicle for the two best venting configurations. This is to determine the venting configuration that would diminish the accumulation of a flammable mixture, as well as dissipating the mixture quickest after the release has stopped. The modelling strategy utilised for this work is validated against two different sets of experimental data, prior to the investigation into residential garages. The predicted and experimental results show good agreement for the modelling procedure suggested. The reacting investigations are for both premixed and non-premixed combustion. The non-premixed combustion investigates the temperature distributions and as such the possible harm to people for such a scenario, compared against experimental data. The results show some over predictions of the temperatures. The premixed combustion investigates the potential overpressures that may occur if a homogeneous mixture was to form and ignite, within a residential garage. This work is preceded by a validation of the combustion model with the predicted results compared to data from The University of Sydney. The validation results show that the modelling strategy matches the peak overpressures accurately. The non-reacting studies show that having a lower vent opposite the release and an higher vent near the release produces the smallest flammable mixture as well as dissipating the mixture to the external surroundings quickest. The non-premixed reacting work shows good agreement with experimental results. The premixed reacting work shows that the garage would destruct with major consequences to people and surroundings. This work would be applicable to any potential usage of indoor refuelling for hydrogen vehicles, helping to determine a suitable configuration for mitigating hydrogen releases. It should be noted that all such work is geometrically dependent and as such the strategy proposed would be useful for investigating individual scenarios.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Ignition of a combustible mixture by a transient jet of hot reactive gas is important for safety of mines, pre-chamber ignition in IC engines, detonation initiation, and in novel constant-volume combustors. The present work is a numerical study of the hot-jet ignition process in a long constant-volume combustor (CVC) that represents a wave-rotor channel. The mixing of hot jet with cold mixture in the main chamber is first studied using non-reacting simulations. The stationary and traversing hot jets of combustion products from a pre-chamber is injected through a converging nozzle into the main CVC chamber containing a premixed fuel-air mixture. Combustion in a two-dimensional analogue of the CVC chamber is modeled using global reaction mechanisms, skeletal mechanisms, and detailed reaction mechanisms for four hydrocarbon fuels: methane, propane, ethylene, and hydrogen. The jet and ignition behavior are compared with high-speed video images from a prior experiment. Hybrid turbulent-kinetic schemes using some skeletal reaction mechanisms and detailed mechanisms are good predictors of the experimental data. Shock-flame interaction is seen to significantly increase the overall reaction rate due to baroclinic vorticity generation, flame area increase, stirring of non-uniform density regions, the resulting mixing, and shock compression. The less easily ignitable methane mixture is found to show higher ignition delay time compared to slower initial reaction and greater dependence on shock interaction than propane and ethylene. The confined jet is observed to behave initially as a wall jet and later as a wall-impinging jet. The jet evolution, vortex structure and mixing behavior are significantly different for traversing jets, stationary centered jets, and near-wall jets. Production of unstable intermediate species like C2H4 and CH3 appears to depend significantly on the initial jet location while relatively stable species like OH are less sensitive. Inclusion of minor radical species in the hot-jet is observed to reduce the ignition delay by 0.2 ms for methane mixture in the main chamber. Reaction pathways analysis shows that ignition delay and combustion progress process are entirely different for hybrid turbulent-kinetic scheme and kinetics-only scheme.