NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

An overall effort to reduce the greenhouse warming potential of refrigerants for refrigeration systems in the US has shortened the overall candidate list to a class of refrigerants that exhibit higher flammability than their predecessors. This has required investigations to ensure that the potential fire/explosion hazards associated with leakage of a flammable refrigerant are properly addressed and mitigated.



The main means to gaining this understanding has been through physical testing.

However, there is a challenge and a limit to using physical testing to thoroughly understand the potential risks associated with leakage of a combustible refrigerant in confined spaces. The challenge is that physical testing, especially if it could involve fire and explosion, is expensive and time consuming. Each test is a single data point and so many tests must be run which requires significant funding. Yet, it is another limit of physical testing that is most problematic. For a physical test, it is only possible to capture data at discreet points. These discrete points are usually selected to address the specific question the test was designed to answer and so the data collected may not provide sufficient overall insight into the testing conditions under consideration or allow for generalization.





The intent of our research is to demonstrate two things (1) strong validation evidence for a computational fluid dynamics based simulation of refrigerant leakage in gaseous form in a confined space. We show the value of physical testing be designed to help advance the use of computational modeling tools. We also cover the key physics necessary to accurately model gaseous refrigerant leakage scenarios. And, (2) we present a new risk metric for assessing the fire/explosion hazards associated with leakage of refrigerant into a confined space. This metric can only be obtained from the rich data provided by such computer-based engineering tools such as computational fluid dynamics.