HSE shares hydrogen safety science at ICHS 2023

11 September 2023

Next week sees the start of the tenth International Conference on Hydrogen Safety (ICHS 2023) which will be held in Québec City, Canada, under the auspices of the International Association for Hydrogen Safety (HySafe).

The event brings together the international hydrogen safety community and provides a valuable platform for the presentation and discussion of new findings, information and data on hydrogen safety - from basic research to applied development and from good practice to standardisation and regulatory issues.

The conference programme features plenary presentations by leaders in hydrogen from across the globe as well as over 135 refereed papers from the most eminent hydrogen safety experts within government, research organisations, industry and academia, including 14 papers involving HSE scientists, engineers and policy professionals:

• Hydrogen dispersion following blowdown releases into a tunnel - Kieran Lyons, Wayne Rattigan, Keith Moodie
• CFD dispersion simulations of compressed hydrogen releases through TPRD inside scaled tunnel - Stella Giannissi, Alexandros Venetsanos, Wayne Rattigan, et.al
• Sudden releases of hydrogen into a tunnel - Kieran Lyons, Wayne Rattigan, Bruce Ewan, et.al
• Visualisation and quantification of wind-induced variability in hydrogen clouds following releases of liquid hydrogen - Ian Palin, Kieran Lyons, William Buttner, et.al
• CFD analysis of delayed ignition hydrogen releases from a train inside a tunnel - Ilias Tolias, Wayne Rattigan, Kieran Lyons, et.al.
• Deflagrations of non-uniform hydrogen/air clouds in a tunnel - Wayne Rattigan, Kieran Lyons, Keith Moodie, et.al
• Erosive effects of hydrogen jet fires on tunnel structural materials - Sarah Bergin, Mark Pursell, James Fletcher, et.al
• Zone of Negligible Extent: Example of specific detailed risk assessment for low pressure equipment in a hydrogen refuelling station - David Torrado, Ju Lynne Saw, Matthew Ivings, et.al.
• Purging hydrogen distribution pipelines: literature review, description of recent experiments and proposed future work - Simon Gant, Simon Coldrick, Jonathan Hall, et.al.
• Ignition and Flow Stopping Considerations for the Transmission of Hydrogen in the Existing Natural Gas Network - Richard Goff, Jonathan Hall
• UK HSE hydrogen for heating evidence review process - Mike Wardman, Kelli Jones
• Enhancing safety of liquid and vaporised hydrogen transfer technologies in public areas for mobile applications - Federico Ustolin, Stuart Hawksworth et al.
• Detailed Assessment of Dispersion for High-Pressure H2 in Multi-fuel Environment - Elena Vyazmina, Deborah Houssin, James Stewart, Matthew Ivings, Chris Dixon, Guillaume Lecocq
• Identification of safety critical scenarios of hydrogen refuelling stations in a multifuel context - Sebastien Quesnel, Sylvaine Pique, Elena Vyazmina, Ju Lynne Saw

In addition to the paper presentations, Senior Hydrogen Scientist Jonathan Hall will also chair one of the conference's technical sessions.

HSE is a founding member of HySafe and has been part of the conference's organising committee since its inception in 2005.

Commenting on HSE's involvement, Stuart Hawksworth, who leads HSE's Centre for Energy and Major Hazards and is also Past President of HySafe, remarked:

'HSE has been at the forefront of prenormative hydrogen safety research for over 20 years. Transferring the knowledge we generate to others in the international hydrogen safety community and, in turn, learning from their work, will help HSE to enable UK industry to innovate safely to prevent major incidents, supporting the move towards net zero.'

For full details of the programme, visit the ICHS Conference website