Petersen, W.B., W. Snyder, J. Ku, AND S.T. Rao. DISPERSION OF DENSE GAS RELEASES IN A WIND TUNNEL. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/D-88/207 (NTIS PB89118509), 1988.
The paper documents two dense gas projects undertaken at the US EPA Fluid Modeling Facility. The study investigated the basic nature of the transport and dispersion of a dense gas plume in a simulated neutral atmospheric boundary layer. The two dense gas releases were CO2 and SF6. The configuration of the wind tunnel was the same for both gases, except that the wind speed had to be increased 20% in the SF6 study to avoid laminarization of the plume. The plumes were tracked by mixing a small fraction of ethane with the dense gases and using flame ionization detectors to measure downwind lateral and vertical concentration profiles. The increased density clearly has very significant effects. The vertical spread of the SF6 plume was about two-thirds that of the CO2 plume. Perhaps the most unusual finding was that the shapes of the vertical distributions remained similar far downstream and high non-Gaussian in the outer reaches of the plume.