Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure to design an experimental setup meant to validate an innovative approach for simulating, via computational fluid dynamics, a high-pressure gas release from a rupture (e.g. on an offshore oil and gas platform). The design is based on a series of scaling exercises, some of which are anything but trivial.

Design/methodology/approach

The experimental setup is composed of a wind tunnel, the instrumented scaled (1:10) mock-up of an offshore platform and a gas release system. A correct scaling approach is necessary to define the reference speed in the wind tunnel and the conditions of the gas release to maintain similarity with respect to the real-size phenomena. The scaling of the wind velocity and the scaling of the gas release were inspired by the approach proposed by Hall et al. (1997): a dimensionless group was chosen to link release parameters, wind velocity and geometric scaling factor.

Findings

The theoretical scaling approaches for each different part of the setup were applied to the design of the experiment and some criticalities were identified, such as the existence of a set of case studies with some release parameters laying outside the applicability range of the developed scaling methodology, which will be further discussed.

Originality/value

The resulting procedure is one of a kind because it involves a multi-scaling approach because of the different aspects of the design. Literature supports for the different scaling theories but, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, fails to provide an integrated approach that considers the combined effects of scaling.

中文翻译：

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设计意外气体释放实验的缩放程序

目的

本文的目的是提出一个设计实验装置的程序，旨在验证一种创新方法，通过计算流体动力学模拟从破裂处（例如海上石油和天然气平台）释放的高压气体。该设计基于一系列缩放练习，其中一些绝不是微不足道的。

设计/方法/方法

实验装置由风洞、离岸平台的仪表比例 (1:10) 模型和气体释放系统组成。必须采用正确的缩放方法来定义风洞中的参考速度和气体释放条件，以保持与实际尺寸现象的相似性。风速的缩放和气体释放的缩放受到 Hall等人提出的方法的启发。(1997)：选择了一个无量纲组来链接释放参数、风速和几何比例因子。

发现

将设置的每个不同部分的理论缩放方法应用于实验设计，并确定了一些关键性，例如存在一组案例研究，其中一些释放参数超出了所开发的缩放方法的适用范围，这将进一步讨论。

原创性/价值

由此产生的程序是一种，因为它涉及到设计的不同方面的多尺度方法。文献支持不同的标度理论，但据作者所知，未能提供考虑标度综合效应的综合方法。