Fuel Volatility Effects on Pool Fires in Compartments with Low Ventilation

Abstract

Pool fires in low ventilation compartments give rise to ghosting flames and their toxic and particulate emissions were investigated for 400mm square pool fires in a 1.6 m 3 compartment with ventilation of 0.035 kg/m 2 s, air mass flow rate per pool surface area. These conditions produced global compartment equivalence ratios that were rich and this did occur for kerosene and heptane , but diesel and toluene only achieved near stoichiometric conditions . The low ventilation produced low ceiling temperatures of between 380 and 480 o C with the highest temperature for diesel and the lowest for heptane. Particulate mass emissions were highest for kerosene at 6.5 g/kg f and lowest for heptane at 0.9 g/kg f . Soot emissions were lowest for heptane at 0.2 g/kg f and highest for kerosene at 5 g/kg f . These are relatively low soot emissions, due to the low fire temperatures for near stoichiometric combustion. These low temperatures were mainly due to low combustion efficiencies with high CO and HC yields.

Evaluation of CFD simulations of transient pool fire burning rates

“…The liquid fuel depths used are usually shallow and less than 50 mm. However, process industry incidents often involve more complex scenarios, such as those with: process equipment in or near the fuel spillage area; pool fires resulting from process equipment leaks inside industrial plant with restricted air supply and ceiling accumulation of fire products (Chamberlain, 1996;Aljumaiah et al, 2014); pool fires located against vertical walls of storage vessels; pool fires inside deep fuel storage tanks. Whilst modelling approaches such as those of Babrauskas (1983) and Ditch et al (2013) are useful, typically only requiring knowledge of the fuel properties and size of the pool, they are limited to predicting quasi-steady burning rates, rather than the transient burning rate profiles observed in fire tests (Pretrel et al, 2005).…”

Experimental and numerical simulation studies on diesel pool fire

“…Table summarizes few important studies. Most of these studies investigated the flame behavior and burning rate under different ventilation conditions. Hamins et al .…”