Although the diffusion of its storage and transport under liquefied conditions, nowadays it is common to have methane in gaseous form in several industrial applications. This leads to safety implications to be considered: hazards are linked to both the high-pressure at which the gas is kept and to its flammability. Scenarios where flammable jets impact an obstacle are of paramount importance because of their possible occurrence. Following a numerical approach, literature shows up that their assessment can be reliably performed by means of only Computational Fluid Dynamics tools. However, despite the improvements of computing power, Computational Fluid Dynamics costs still limit its use in daily risk analysts’ activities. Therefore, considering an accidental jet-obstacle scenario of industrial interest, the present work investigates how a pipe rack can influence the development of a high-pressure methane jet. Based on a Computational Fluid Dynamics analysis, main achievements of this work are a simple criterion able to identify the situations where the pipe rack does not influence the high-pressure methane jet behavior, therefore allowing to identify the scenarios where simpler models can be used (i.e., analytical correlations known for the free jet situation), and, if present, a simple analytical relationship that roughly predicts the influence of the pipe rack without the need of performing complex Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations.

尽管其储存和运输在液化条件下扩散，但如今在几种工业应用中普遍存在气态甲烷。这导致需要考虑安全性：危害与气体保持的高压及其易燃性有关。易燃喷射流撞击障碍物的场景至关重要，因为它们可能发生。遵循数值方法，文献表明，仅通过计算流体动力学工具就可以可靠地进行评估。但是，尽管计算能力得到了改善，但计算流体动力学的成本仍然限制了其在日常风险分析师活动中的使用。因此，考虑到工业利益的意外喷射障碍场景，本工作研究了管架如何影响高压甲烷射流的发展。基于计算流体动力学分析，这项工作的主要成就是一个简单的标准，能够确定管架不影响高压甲烷喷射行为的情况，因此可以确定可以使用更简单模型的情况（（例如，对于自由射流情况已知的分析相关性），以及（如果存在）简单的分析关系，可以粗略地预测管架的影响，而无需执行复杂的计算流体动力学模拟。