CFD Gas Explosion Simulation on LNG-Fueled Ship

Abstract

Abstract The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has issued the regulation of the Emission Control Area (ECA). This area was designated to control the air pollutant which emitted by conventional fuel from a ship. Thus, LNG fuel could be an alternative fuel to deal with a new regulation. However, the utilization of LNG fuel in the ship should be proven for its safety and reliability. The scope of this work was to capture the blast overpressure as an accidental load. The open-deck fuel gas supply system (FGSS) of the hypothetical Oil Tanker was used as a target for the explosion model. The parameters of the scenarios consisted of the gas cloud size and gas cloud center of gravity in X, Y, and Z directions. Each parameter contains a likelihood, and it should be converted as probability density functions (PDF). Thus, it can be utilized to generate 50 scenarios by Latin Hypercube sampling. This research used the ExSim CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code to simulate a gas explosion. The grid convergence and software validation were also conducted to understand the software performance. Finally, the overpressure and gas explosion frequency from scenarios could be utilized to determine the exceedance frequency diagram. This diagram could be used as a prediction of the gas explosion on the LNG-fueled ship.