A quantitative correlation of evaluating the flame speed for the BST method in vapor cloud explosions

In recent decades, vapor cloud explosions (VCEs) have occurred frequently and resulted in numerous personnel injuries and large property losses. As a main concern in the petrochemical industry, it is of great importance to assess the consequence of VCEs. Currently, the TNT equivalency method (TNT EM), the TNO multi-energy method (TNO MEM), and the Baker-Strehlow-Tang (BST) method are widely used to estimate the blast load from VCEs. The TNO MEM and BST method determine the blast load from blast curves based on the class number and the flame speed, respectively. To quantitatively evaluate the flame speed for the BST method, the experimental data is adopted to validate the confinement specific correlation (CSC) for the determination of the class number in the TNO MEM. As a bridge, a quantitative evaluation correlation (QEC) between CSC correlation and the flame speed is established and the blast wave shapes corresponding to different flame speeds are proposed. CFD software FLACS was used to verify the quantitative correlation with the numerical models of three geometrical scales. It is found that the calculated flame speeds by the QEC are in good agreement with the simulated ones. A petrochemical plant is selected as a realistic scenario to analyze the TNT EM, TNO MEM, BST method and FLACS simulations in terms of the positive-phase side-on overpressure and impulse at different distances. Compared with the flame speed table, the predicted overpressure from BST curves determined by the proposed QEC is closer to that from FLACS and more conservative. Furthermore, the predicted results of different methods are compared with each other. It is found that the estimated positive-phase side-on overpressure and impulse by the TNO MEM are the largest, and the estimated impulse by the TNT EM is the smallest. Moreover, the estimated overpressure and impulse are larger in the higher reactivity gas.