Experimental and numerical simulation studies on diesel pool fire

Experimental studies are performed under different ventilation conditions to investigate the effect of ventilation on compartment fires. A compartment of size 4mx4mx4m having a door of size 2mx1m is used for experiments. The experiments are conducted with full door open and half door open conditions. Diesel, used as a fuel source, is placed in a pan of 40cm diameter and 15cm height, which is kept in the center of the compartment. During experiments a constant 12cm height of the fuel is maintained above the pan bottom. The maximum heat release rate is found to be 100kW and 115kW in full door open and half door open experiments respectively. It is observed that the size of door opening affected the heat release rate, burning rate and thermal environment inside the compartment after the growth period of 800s. The numerical simulation is also performed for full door open experiment using CFD code, Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS, version 6.0.1) developed by NIST. Simulation is accomplished with the refinement of mesh size near the fire source; results from FDS closely match with the experimental results. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.