An experimental investigation of burning behaviour of liquid pool fire in corridor-like enclosures

Konstantinos Chotzoglou,Eleni Asimakopoulou,Michael Delichatsios,Jianping Zhang

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1107/4/042024

Konstantinos Chotzoglou, Eleni Asimakopoulou + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1107/4/042024

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Abstract

This work aims to investigate the burning behavior of a liquid fuel pool fire in a corridor-like enclosure and to identify the key factors influencing fire development. A series of experiments is conducted in a medium-scale corridor-facade configuration using ethanol pool fires. A new fuel supply system has been developed to keep the fuel level constant to minimize lip effects. The influence of fuel surface area and ventilation factor on the fire development is also investigated. Experimental measurements consist of mass loss, heat release rate, temperatures and heat fluxes inside the corridor. Experimental results indicate that in corridor-like enclosures the fuel burning rate in ventilation-controlled conditions corresponds to about 2/3 of that observed in cubic-like enclosures. The fuel burning rate varies as the temperature distribution in the enclosure changes from uniform, in cubic-like enclosures, to layered, in corridors. The ventilation coefficient value used for the calculation of the inflow rate in corridor-like enclosures during post-flashover conditions is found to decrease with an increase of the ventilation factor.

Highlights

The study and understanding of the physics in enclosure fires is of considerable importance to the fire safety engineering community, most of the available data concern cubic-like enclosures [1, 2, 3]
Before detailed analysis of the experimental measurement data (HRR, gas temperature, heat fluxes), some general observations are made based on video recordings, mass loss rate (MLR) and heat release rate (HRR) measurements
The focus of the current study is the investigation of the effect of realistic fire load and ventilation conditions on the burning rate and fire development at a medium-scale corridor-like enclosure

Summary

Introduction

The study and understanding of the physics in enclosure fires is of considerable importance to the fire safety engineering community, most of the available data concern cubic-like enclosures [1, 2, 3]. Kawagoe [1] applied the Bernoulli equation to calculate the air inflow through a single moderate opening when under-ventilated conditions prevail and found that ṁ a is proportional to AvHv1/2, as shown in Equation (1), assuming uniform temperature distribution in the interior of a cubic enclosure [1, 10]. He introduced the proportional constant C that is referred to as the ventilation coefficient and takes values ranging from 0.45 [1] to 0.52 [11] for cubic enclosures with moderate openings. Based on those early research findings, Delichatsios et al [3] proposed a correction for the expression of ṁ a for cubic enclosures, as shown in Equation (2), by subtracting Equation (1) by 0.5ṁ T, where ṁ T is the burning rate of the fuel:

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