Experimental investigation on thermal radiation of compartment fire under fuel-controlled condition

Abstract

Due to the serious adverse thermal impact on adjacent rooms and buildings, compartment fire is one of the very important topics in fire research. While for the thermal radiation of compartment fire, there are few related studies with a lack of thermal radiation models. This article experimentally studied the evolutions of radiation heat flux of compartment fire under fuel-controlled condition. Experiments were carried out employing a reduced-scale compartment with a wall opening whose size can be adjusted. The radiant heat flux (RHF) from compartment fire received by target object was measured and analyzed for various opening sizes, fuel supply rates, horizontal distances and vertical heights, and a total of 180 test data were considered. Results showed that with the increasing horizontal distance between the target object and the compartment opening, the RHF decreased rapidly at first and then decreased gradually. The view factor of the opening toward the target object was analyzed, which was related to the opening size, the horizontal distance and vertical height. The view factor exhibited an evolution pattern of the first rapidly decreasing and then slowly decreasing with horizontal distance, which was similar to the RHF received by the target object. Then, based on the view factor, the radiation model related to the opening dimension and temperature inside compartment was proposed to calculate RHF received by target object, which was proved to be in good consistency with experimental data.