Numerical Study of Concurrent Flame Spread Over an Array of Thin Discrete Solid Fuels PDF Download

Author: Jeanhyuk Park
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Flame spread
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Get Book Here

Book Description
Building fire, Forrest fire, and warehouse compartment fire are some of the most frequently occurring practical fire hazards in modern world. Although these types of hazards seem irrelevant from one another, they have some things in common from the perspective of fire protection engineering, in that they all have a very similar fundamental fuel-gap configuration, or discrete fuel configuration. There has been some studies in the past regarding the subject, yet it is not the most popular in the field. Furthermore, there is even fewer, if not any, numerical analysis done to fires in discrete fuel configuration. Discrete fuel arrangements represent some practical fire hazard situations, such as compartment fires in enclosed vehicles. In this study, an unsteady two-dimensional numerical model (Fire Dynamics Simulator) was used to simulate concurrent flame spreadover paper-like thin solid fuels in discrete configurations in microgravity (0g, where a20cm/s flow is imposed) and in normal gravity (1g). An array of ten 1cm-long fuel segments is uniformly distributed in the flow direction (0g) or in the vertical direction (1g).A hot spot ignition source is applied at the upstream leading edge of the first fuel seg-ment. The separation distance between the fuel segments is a parameter in this study, ranging from 0 (corresponding to a continuous fuel) to 3cm. Using this setup, the spread rate of the flame base and the fuel burning rate were studied. The spread rate in 1g and 0g increases with increasing separation distance. This is due to the gaps in the discrete fuel that force the flame base to jump to the subsequent fuel segment when the upstream segment burns out. On the other hand, the fuel burning rate behaves differently in 1g versus 0g. At a flow velocity of 20 cm/s in 0g, the flame reaches a limiting length and the flame length is approximately the same ( 4cm) for all fuel configurations. Therefore, as the separation distance increases, the preheating length (the fuel area exposed to the flame) decreases, resulting in a smaller burning rate. In 1g, the buoyancy driven flow accelerates as it rises, resulting in a longer flame as the separation distance increases. In all simulated configurations, the flame extends to the last fuel segment before the first fuel segment burns out and the flame spans the entire set of fuel segments. However, flame standoff distance reduces at the gaps between fuel segments, and in some con-figurations, the flame breaks into multiple flamelets. The shorter standoff distance and intense burning at each flamelet base result in a larger total burning rate as the separation distance increases.