Numerical Studies on Heat Release Rate in Room Fire on Liquid Fuel under Different Ventilation Factors

Abstract

Heat release rate (HRR) of the design fire is the most important parameter in assessing building fire hazards. However, HRR in room fire was only studied by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in most of the projects determining fire safety provisions by performance-based design. In contrast to ten years ago, officers in the Far East are now having better knowledge of CFD. Two common questions are raised on CFD-predicted results on describing free boundaries; and on computing grid size. In this work, predicting HRR by the CFD model was justified with experimental room pool fire data reported earlier. The software fire dynamics simulator (FDS) version 5 was selected as the CFD simulation tool. Prescribed input heating rate based on the experimental results was used with the liquid fuel model in FDS. Five different free boundary conditions were investigated to predict HRR. Grid sensitivity study was carried out using one stretched mesh and multiple uniform meshes with different grid sizes. As it is difficult to have the entire set of CFD predicted results agreed with experiments, macroscopic flow parameters on the mass flow rate through door opening predicted by CFD were also justified by another four conditions with different ventilation factors.

Smoke movement in tilted tunnel fires with longitudinal ventilation

“…As reported by Cai and Chow [21] in using FDS 5.0.0 for studying liquid pool fire under different ventilation conditions, the averaged predicted HRR by the liquid fuel model in FDS 5.0.0 did not agree with the experimental results. The upgraded version FDS 5.5.3 with liquid fuel and gaseous products using appropriate thermophysical properties was used in this paper to simulate the combustion process of liquid fuel.…”

“…The CFD software Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) [17] is used in this paper. FDS is widely used in studying building fires [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”

Apron design for protecting double‐skin façade fires

“…Note that CFD fire model is not yet fully validated and verified in the aforementioned study. Applying CFD to performance‐based design should be further justified with full‐scale burning tests as pointed out . Therefore, apron design, if selected, should be assessed in individual projects through experimental studies.…”

Numerical simulation on temperature in wood crib fires

“…For engineering purposes, one-step reaction assumption is used for modeling the pyrolysis with appropriate kinetic parameters [17].…”