Incident investigation and support

When an incident or accident happens, it is very import to understand the causes and the course of the incident. There is a need to understand what went wrong, whether the incident could have developed into an even worse accident, and to find ways to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. For such work, the combination of solid phenomenon understanding and accurate CFD-calculations that illustrate the physics is a key.

Olav Roald Hansen has supported incident and accident investigations performing detailed CFD calculations on several occasions. For some of these articles are published, see below, while others are client confidential.

In 2019, an attempt to model, understand and explain the consequences of the Kjørbo hydrogen refuelling station explosion was performed as part of the MoZEES project. Results were presented at an open project workshop October 23, 2019, using publicly available information only. This study concluded that the main explosion must have been an unconfined detonation of the gas cloud released from the high-pressure storage bottle. The slides from the presentation can be found here.