CFD and experimental studies of room fire growth on wall lining materials

• Published in: Fire safety journal Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 201 - 238
• Main Authors: Yan, Zhenghua, Holmstedt, Göran
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 01.10.1996; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Building technical equipments; Building Technologies; Buildings; Buildings. Public works; Calorimeters; Civil Engineering; Combustion; Computational fluid dynamics; Engineering and Technology; Exact sciences and technology; Fire behavior of materials and structures; Fire protection; Fires; Heat conduction; Heat radiation; Heat transfer; Husbyggnad; Pyrolysis; Samhällsbyggnadsteknik; Teknik; Temperature; Pyrolysis; Fire development; Wall covering; Fire test; Combustion; Two dimensional model; Experimental study; Room; Mass flow; Heat liberation
• ISSN: 0379-7112
• DOI: 10.1016/S0379-7112(96)00044-6

CFD simulation and experimental tests have been carried out to study the room corner fire growth on combustible wall-lining materials. In the CFD simulation, the turbulent mass and heat transfer, and combustion were considered. The discrete transfer (DT) method was employed to calculate the radiation with an absorptivity and emissivity model employed to predict the radiation property of combustion products including soot, CO 2 and H 2O, which are usually the primary radiating species in the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels. The temperature of the solid boundary was determined by numerical solution of the heat conduction equation. A simple and practical pyrolysis model was developed to describe the response of the solid fuel. This pyrolysis model was first tested against the Cone Calorimeter data for both charring and non-charring materials under different irradiance levels and then coupled to CFD calculations. Both full and one-third scale room corner fire growths on particle board were modelled with CFD. The calculation was tested with various numbers of rays and grid sizes, showing that the present choice gives practically grid- and ray number-independent predictions. The heat release rate, wall surface temperature, char depth, gas temperature and radiation flux are compared with experimental measurements. The results are reasonable and the comparison between prediction and experiment is fairly good and promising.