Contribution of soot particles on global radiative heat transfer in a two-compartment fire

This paper presents a numerical study on the application of three widely adopted soot models and their effects on the global radiative heat transfer characteristic in a two-compartment fire. The study attempts to completely model the simultaneously occurring flow, convection, combustion, soot generation and radiation phenomena in the compartment fire. Computational results with or without soot consideration are validated against a full-scale experimental data. The performances of the three soot models are evaluated in terms of prediction errors. In general, the soot model by Moss et al. (Combust Flame 101 (1995) 491) and Syed et al. (Proceedings of the 23rd Symposium on Combustion, The Combustion Institute, 1990, p. 1533) produced the best agreement with experimental data. The model is considered as a suitable candidate for considering soot production in compartment fires. The results also demonstrated the feasibility of applying the semi-empirical soot models for simulating realistic compartment fires. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.