UK HSE Repeatability Experiments – Attempt 1

Following on from my #CFDFail series I’ve started to learn my way through the new in house we are developing in conjunction with Advanced Analysis Australia. In this case we are looking at validation against a series of physical experiments undertaken by the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive back in the 1980s and 1990s as part of their offshore safety programs. These three videos show the results of a two-dimensional CFD simulation from our exploCFD software set for slightly above the highest measured explosion – so not a great validation case but a pretty cool set of animations anyway.

We are looking at a synthetic Schlieren image: that is the gradient of the density to visualise changes in density due to the shock waves passing. It is interesting to note that there appears to be a number of recompression regions as the shock waves interact with obstacles in the far field as well as a rarefaction wave late in the animation.

I need to get back and look through the initial conditions to find out why my initial conditions were too energetic – and no prizes for the first comment that says too much explosive material!

Enjoy the three videos that start with a very wide field and zoom into the structure.

Wide View

Intermediate View

Zoom View

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