An experimental approach for verifying the effectiveness of the optimized scheme of gas detector placement in process installations

Abstract

The research on optimization for gas detectors placement has addressed great attention in recent years. The steps of optimization include setting up a leak scenario library, predicting the leakage and dispersion consequences by Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation, and employing the stochastic programming (SP) method to find the optimal layout scheme. In this paper, an experiment approach of verifying the effectiveness of the optimized gas detector placement is proposed. Firstly, a scale-down process experiment unit is built and a similar CFD model has been set up to predict the gas leakage consequences. Secondly, the optimal scheme is acquired by the CFD simulation results and the SP model. Thirdly, the position to install gas sensors in the experiment unit is determined by the locations of the monitor points in the CFD simulation. Gas leakage and dispersion experiments are conducted, and the sensor readings of gas concentration are recorded. Finally, the comparison results of the detection time of all schemes demonstrate that the optimized scheme obtained by the SP approach has a better performance than most other nonoptimal schemes. This research is significant in providing support for the validity of the current SP model in gas detector placement optimization problems.

Keywords:

• optimization
• placement of gas detectors
• experiment verification
• scale-down unit
• computational fluid dynamics (CFD)

Acknowledgment

We appreciate those who assisted us in the process of the study, the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (18CX05028A). Also, the research is conducted within the “Gas leakage monitoring and optimization research” project under contract (JS2021-68) with the Gas Transmission Management Department of PetroChina Southwest Oil and Gasfield Company (SWOG).