Containers are being considered for hydrogen fuel installations either be at the refuelling station housing the compressor and pumps or for portable standalone power generation units housing the fuel cell and its accessories. Identifying the hazards associated with these kind of container applications is essential for its design, safe operations and in mitigating any accidental risks. Recently both numerical study and experiment have been performed to ascertain the level of hazards and its possible mitigation methods. This paper presents the numerical modelling and the simulations performed using the HYFOAM solver, developed in-house using the opensource CFD toolkit OpenFOAM libraries. The turbulent flame deflagration is modelled using the flame wrinkling combustion model. Additional sub-models are added to the combustion model to account for the dominant flame instabilities present in the vented lean hydrogen-air mixtures deflagrations. The 20-foot ISO containers of dimensions 20’ x 8’ x 8’.6” filled with homogenous mixture of hydrogen-air at different concentration, with and without model obstacles are considered for numerical simulations. The numerical predictions are first validated against the experiments carried out by Gexcon as part of the HySEA project supported by the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking (FCH 2 JU) under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The container wall deflections were found to be considerable in the experiments, contributing to the overpressure though acoustic and structural resonance responses. The preliminary CFD predictions also indicated that the container wall deflections are having considerable effect on the generated numerical overpressures trends, especially the peak negative pressure generated within the container is overestimated. Hence to account for the container wall deflections, the Fluid Structure Interactions (FSI) are also included in the numerical modelling. The CFD and FSI are coupled in pseudo two-way approach. The final numerical predictions are presented with and without the FSI.

International Seminar on Fire and Explosion Hazards (9; 2019; Saint Petersburg, Russia). Proceedings of the Ninth International Seminar on Fire and Explosion Hazards [Электронный ресурс]: 21-26 April 2019, Saint Petersburg, Russia. Vol. 1 / Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Autonomous Non-Profit Organization "Fire and Explosion Safety", Gefest Holding Ltd ; [edited by A. Snegirev [et al.]. — Электрон. текстовые дан. (1 файл : 118 Мб). — Saint Petersburg, 2019. — Загл. с титул. экрана. — Свободный доступ из сети Интернет (чтение, печать, копирование). — Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0. — <URL:http://elib.spbstu.ru/dl/2/k19-45.pdf>. — <URL:http://doi.org/10.18720/SPBPU/2/k19-45>.