Heavy Gas Dispersion Modelling Over a Topographically Complex Mesoscale: A CFD Based Approach

Abstract: Potentially dangerous events involving heavy gas dispersion and their severe consequences have been largely publicized by the media. Simplified models have been widely applied to describe the effects of these accidents. However, most simplified models deal with flat terrain scenarios and are based on quite crude simplifications of the complex phenomenology involved. In this paper the possibility of simulating the dispersion of heavy gas clouds over a large topographically complex area (tens of km) by a general purpose computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code is investigated. The aim is that of setting up a tool able to produce a realistic description of such dispersion processes, w…