SAFER Systems’ Research and Development Staff Presents Pool Evaporation Modeling Poster at 2012 Global Congress on Process Safety in Houston, TX

SAFER Systems’ Anjana Meel and Shahryar Khajehnajafi, of the Research and Development team, will be giving a poster presentation at the 2012 Global Congress on Process Safety Poster Session at the AIChE Spring Meeting in Houston on April 3 at the George R Brown Convention Center.  The title of the poster is, “A comparative analysis of two approaches for pool evaporation modeling: Shrinking vs. Non-shrinking pool area”. Please see this link for the abstract of this poster on the AIChE website.

Prediction of pool evaporation rates in the event of liquid spills is an important topic in emergency response. The issues related to dynamics of the pool spreading and shrinking phases that have not been addressed satisfactorily in literature are: a) the maximum radius a pool can expand to; b) minimum height it can reach before a homogenous pool breaks up into patches of liquids; and c) the criteria for the shrinking phase of the pool. This leads to the question of which mechanism dominates the shrinking of the pool during evaporation; a decrease in the radius of the pool or a decrease in the height of the pool?

To answer this question, the shrinking phase of the pool evaporation model for liquid spills on solid surfaces in unconfined settings has been broadly categorized into two mechanisms: (1) Radius shrinking approach (RSA), also referred to as shrinking pool area and (2) Height shrinking approach (HSA), also referred to as non-shrinking pool area. Several arguments are presented to show merits of Height Shrinking Approach (HSA) over Radius Shrinking Approach (RSA) for modeling of evaporation process in the case of liquid pool formations. Evaporation rates and radius of the pool are compared for single component and binary component spills in both continuous and instantaneous release settings using HSA and RSA approach.

The complete paper will be published on www.safersystem.com after the conference has concluded.

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