A study on the effect of air humidity on jet flames of hydrogen ships

Marine Engineering College, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, Liaoning 116000, China

^* Corresponding author’s e-mail: yanggg@dlmu.edu.cn

Abstract

With the rapid development of the shipping industry and the proposal of “double carbon” strategy, green shipping has become the center of development in China. Hydrogen-powered ships are powered by hydrogen fuel cells, which have the advantages of zero pollution, zero emission, fast charging speed, and high stability during operation; these features make hydrogen-powered ships have a broader development prospect. Due to the flammable and explosive nature of hydrogen, when hydrogen leakage occurs, combustion and explosion are very likely to occur, so hydrogen safety has also become a major problem for hydrogen-powered ships before they are widely used.In this thesis, the effect of ambient humidity on the hydrogen jet flame is investigated by numerical simulation of hydrogen jet flame generated from a hydrogen fuel cell ship in an open environment using CFD computational fluid dynamics software. The results show that under different ambient air humidity, the upper part of the jet flame is shifted to the cockpit to different degrees, and the difference of its flame shape is small. With the increase of ambient air humidity, the molar concentration of hydrogen distributed on the wall surface of the cockpit decreases gradually, and the temperature decreases gradually.