Modeling glass cooling mechanism with down-flowing water film via the smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

This paper presents a new attempt to investigate the cooling mechanism of glass panes with down-flowing water film during fire outbreak by simulating the heat energy conservation equation using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The nature of meshfree SPH method used allows us to predict the temperature distribution efficiently in continuous flow problems in contrast with mesh-based methods. To validate and show the efficiency of the proposed SPH model, the results from our simulation at specific conditions were compared with experimental measurements and results from commercial software packages. Furthermore, the new SPH model is utilized to simulate the effects of heat flux variation, down-flowing velocity and thickness of water film on temperature distribution of glass during fire. The developed SPH model is well able to describe glass cooling under different conditions. The computational results show that the rate of cooling increases when velocity or thickness of down-flowing water film increases. However, the glass temperature increases when heat flux increases.

A meshfree analysis of the thermal behaviors of hot surface glass pane subjects to down-flowing water film via smoothed particle hydrodynamics

“…Previous experimental temperature measurements and Ansys-fluent software temperature results at the exposed surface of the glass (P3) are compared with our numerical model. Also, CFD-Autodesk and Ansys-CFX are used to verify the temperature values at P3, P18 and P33 points [29].…”

“…( 1) is solved multiple times with different material parameters and boundary conditions to capture the total heat transfer process at each time step of glass cooling simulation. More details can be found in our previous work [29].…”

“…Fig. 3 shows the temperature variation with time at point P3 on the glass after applying water film using our SPH numerical model, experimental measurements and Ansys-fluent [29]. It can be seen that there are some differences between the experimental and the numerical results after 90 seconds, this is due to the effects of water film flow on thermocouples sheets fixed at the exposed surface in the experiment but despite that, all the temperature variation curves are well-aligned particularly at the main cooling stage which occurs before 90 seconds (rapid cooling occurs at the exposed surface), thus indicating the efficiency of our numerical model.…”