ABSTRACT

The accidental release of gases potentially dangerous to the environment and to

human health represents an event that needs to be promptly and effectively
managed. It could result from a damage in the gas pipelines, an accident of a
hazardous-gas transport truck or in industrial plants or from the most dramatic case
of terroristic attack.
The aim of this dissertation was to implement a fast-response numerical package
able to generate accurate concentration distributions of a health-damaging substance
accidentally released in an urban area. The final goal is to develop and to set up an
immediately responsive method applicable in emergency scenarios where an
intervention as immediate as possible is required to safe human lives. This has been
realized gradually, firstly by developing and validating a numerical model of a
simple geometry, and then applying the obtained model to a more complex
geometry, that in this case was the Colosseum’s area in Rome. The analysis and the
test of gas diffusion from a high level source in the simply geometry of an open-field
allowed us to use the computational resources and to improve the time response
more efficiently than in a complex scenario.
We assumed a carbon dioxide release from a stack in a space without any obstacle
other than the natural ground morphology and simulated the diffusion phenomenon
through the CFD code for different wind velocity and temperature gradients.
Concentration, temperature and velocity fields of the hazardous gas have been
obtained through the CFD simulations on the whole computational domain and
properly validated by means of semi-empirical models. The use of Proper
Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) method allowed us to interpolate the results
obtained with Ansys-FLUENT in more significant points of the computational
domain and to generate suitable concentration maps in the same points when
different input parameters are given. The CFD-POD combination is a powerful tool
able to reconstruct snapshots of the most significant parameters for input data set
never considered before, without further fluid dynamic calculations other than the
ones necessary to develop the orthogonal basis on which POD works. This leads to a
drastically reduction of the time required, so that the method might be applicable in
emergency scenarios where a fast-response is necessary. In this context we have
supposed a methane release from a low-level source located in the Monti district,
Rome. By applying the above procedure to this new scenario, it may be possible to
develop a real-time evacuation plan in few minutes (the time required by the code)
since the whole model is already accomplished and the only information to acquire
are the actual meteorological parameters. These are introduced as inputs in the
statistical method that now can generate concentration maps when specific wind
velocity and temperature lapse rate occur.