Experimental and numerical study of the interaction between tempered glass fallout and enclosure fire dynamics

Abstract

Tempered glass, as an important type of safety glazing, is extensively used in high-rise buildings. However, little is known about the fallout behavior of tempered glass in the compartment with different fire locations. Therefore, in this work, the exposed framed glass panes with the dimension of 815 × 815 × 6 mm3 were heated by a pool fire in the compartment. The fuel pans were placed at six different locations in the compartment. It was found that the fallout time of tempered glass increased with a decrease in the distance between the fuel pan and glass panes; when the fire was moved to the wall side, the fallout time of tempered glass was longer. Besides, the temperature gradient of the glass surface at the exposed area was insignificant when the fire source was at the center line of the doorway opening, while there was an evident temperature gradient of the glass surface on the height direction due to the apparent smoke layer in the upper of the compartment for near wall fire locations. In addition, CFD numerical simulations were conducted using FDS software to observe the temperature and velocity fields inside the compartment with different fire locations. It was found that when the fire was moved to the wall side, the circulation flow was formed at both the high-temperature region near the fire source and the low-temperature region on the left of the compartment.