International Journal of Technology (2013) 3: 224‐231 ISSN 2086‐9614 © IJTech 2013 SIMULATION OF GAS LEAKAGE IN A GAS UTILIZATION SYSTEM IN HOUSEHOLD SECTOR Yuswan Muharam 1* , Henry Septian 1 1 Chemical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Universitas Indonesia, Kampus Baru UI Depok 16424, Indonesia (Received: February 2013 / Revised: June 2013 / Accepted: July 2013) ABSTRACT The Indonesian Government is setting up a program of city gas utilization for household sector. People are not convinced of the safety of city gas utilization. One of the accidents people worry about is gas leaks in utilization systems, such as kitchen. Leaking gas is not dangerous when ones can prevent fire ignition. Therefore, information on potential fires caused by leaking gas and methods to prevent their occurrence is needed. This research was intended to obtain the information on fire prevention caused by leaking gas in a kitchen through simulation. The system simulated in the research is a rectangular room of 3 m × 2 m × 3 m. The models consider mass and momentum transfers. The simulation results show that when leaking gas is detected, the leak source must be closed. With the leak source being open, the safe limit is not reached, even if an exhaust fan is provided. Keywords: Gas leak; Fire prevention; Simulation 1. INTRODUCTION In order to reduce fossil fuel consumption, the Indonesian Government has implemented a conversion program from kerosene to subsidized liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). Furthermore, the government has also implemented the utilization of city gas as a substitute for LPG. Yet the program of city gas utilization still raises pros and cons. Community resistance to the program is due to their lack of confidence in the safety of city gas utilization, even though city gas has a higher calorific value per mass than LPG. Moreover, the city gas distribution using pipelines saves the fuel use compared to LPG distribution using trucks. Therefore, the government needs to ensure the safety of city gas utilization. It is necessary to build a safe system of city gas avoiding fire ignition in the event of gas leakage. This study aims to determine safety aspects of city gas utilization systems. The method is simulation of a gas utilization system to predict the distribution of city gas concentration in the event of gas leakage. Research on simulation of indoor and outdoor gas leaks have been carried out. Wu et al. (2007) conducted a simulation of the indoor gas leak by using computational fluid dynamics applications. The regions of concentrations within the explosive limits in the room were calculated. The influence by the release rate of gas leaks and the velocity of the outdoor water flows was studied. Siddiqui et al. (2012) proposed a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based model for indoor risk assessment considering accidental release of a sustained, small, undetected leak of a dense toxic gas in an industrial indoor environment. Liu et al. (2013) used a 3D computational model based on the building location from Google Earth to predict extent of gas leakage. * Corresponding author’s email: muharam@che.ui.ac.id, Tel. +62‐21‐7863516, Fax. +62‐21‐7863515 Permalink/DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14716/ijtech.v5i1.118