The decommissioning of the UK's nuclear legacy sites presents a significant safety challenge: managing hydrogen gas. Generated from nuclear waste, hydrogen can accumulate in silos and storage vessels, forming flammable mixtures with air. If ignited, these can lead to destructive explosions through deflagration and potentially a devastating deflagration-to-detonation transition (DDT). Current safety models often rely on conservative assumptions for uniform mixtures, which may not reflect the complex, stratified gas layers found in real-world scenarios.
This PhD project will address this urgent challenge by developing a fundamental understanding of how hydrogen-air mixtures ignite and explode in conditions directly relevant to the nuclear estate. You will use a state-of-the-art experimental approach, employing a spherical combustion vessel and advanced optical diagnostics (Schlieren, PIV) to study flame acceleration, instability, and quenching in stratified mixtures. This unique experimental data will be used to develop and validate a high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model.
The validated model will be a powerful tool to simulate large-scale explosion scenarios in confined spaces, providing crucial insights for safety cases. This project offers a unique opportunity to work at the interface of cutting-edge experimental combustion and computational modelling, directly impacting the safe and cost-effective decommissioning of sites like Sellafield, Dounreay, and Magnox. You will develop highly sought-after skills in advanced diagnostics, CFD, and nuclear safety, supported by close collaboration with our industrial partner, Sellafield Ltd.