An Engineering Approach to Explosion Vent Sizing

The presentation published here was presented at the 2024 Spring Technical Meeting of the Central States Section of the Combustion Institute (CSSCI), held at Case Western Reserve University in May 2024.

The presentation reviews a simplified simulation-based approach for sizing an explosion vent, where the dust-air mixture is treated as a single fluid continuum. Effective fluid properties (e.g., heat capacity, viscosity) are calculated for the continuum based on the concentration of the dust. The combustion model is calibrated by simulating standardized 20 L sphere tests and adjusting the laminar flame speed until the simulated max rate of pressure rise matches the experimental data of Tascón et al.

There is room to add rigor to the approach, but the focus was primarily to investigate the potential for an efficient, engineering design tool. In the current configuration, a vented explosion can be simulated in about 20 hours using 64 cores on Marquette's HPC system. Going forward, we intend to optimize the model through an improved characterization of the initial and boundary conditions and tuning of the turbulence and combustion models.