Fundamentals of Combustion Safety Scenarios for Hydrogen

Hydrogen is a powerful energy vector but its deployment at the scale considered today by governments and companies cannot be achieved if safety associated to combustion hazards is not mastered and regulated. Hydrogen leaks occur and lead to fires and explosions which must be prevented.

To do this, regulations are needed but these regulations are based today on an incomplete understanding of the fundamental mechanisms controlling the combustion of hydrogen in air or have to consider new usages of hydrogen such as transportation (aircraft, trains, cars).

SAFE-H2 combines theory, high-precision experiments and simulations to provide reliable knowledge on the ignition, propagation, acceleration, mitigation of hydrogen-air flames in three canonical cases: flames stabilized on a hole, flames interacting with a wall, explosions in closed vessels. The proposal gathers (1) IMFT where two experimental sites, dedicated to hydrogen, will be used for low (<40 kW) and high power (300 kW) experiments and (2) CERFACS which provides the High-Performance 3D simulation tools used to compute all IMFT experiments.

Experimental diagnostics coming from the aerospace field will be applied to safety scenarios at IMFT to validate simulation tools.

SAFE-H2 will focus on generic, simple cases to tackle the fundamentals of hydrogen-air flames so that simulation tools incorporate correct, validated physical models and can replace costly and dangerous experimental tests. All SAFE-H2 experiments will be designed to be used for simulation validations.

These detailed comparisons between simulation - experiment will be used to test models for 1) hydrogen-air chemistry in the gas phase and near walls, 2) autoignition and plate ignition, 3) flame-turbulence and flame-wall interaction, and 4) transition to detonation.

SAFE-H2 will deliver fundamental science but also models for all simulation codes used in industry and regulation agencies to understand and regulate combustion safety for hydrogen.