Perspective and criticalities of CFD modelling for the analysis of oil and gas offshore accident scenarios

In the context of offshore installations safety and risk analysis, the field of damage estimation is a crucial aspect, which is typically addressed adopting semi-empirical or CFD models. Nowadays, although the first ones are still the most used, the CFD methods are acquiring ever more importance thanks to their capability to take into account the platform geometry and the complexity of the different phenomena. The present work investigates the features of the state-of-the art CFD models used for offshore installations. An innovative twosteps multi-physics and multi-scale CFD approach is proposed as benchmark, in order to assess the potential but also the criticalities of the main models currently available, and also to show what needs to be further developed. A new improved model (called ‘hybrid model’) is finally presented and compared to the ‘standard’ one.