Heat transfer in vertical casks engulfed in open pool fires

Abstract

Characterization of the heat transfer to a cask engulfed in pool fire is extremely important. Experiments are carried out on diesel pool fires of diameters 0.5, 0.7, and 1.0 m with stainless steel 304L thermal casks of different sizes. Net surface heat flux on the cask is estimated using one-dimensional inverse heat conduction problem code. Velocities of the pool fires are measured using bidirectional probe to estimate the convective heat transfer coefficient ( h). The concept of adiabatic surface temperature, using plate thermometer, is applied to the pool fires and the thermal casks. By employing a mixed boundary condition (adiabatic surface temperature and h) in computational fluid dynamics package, transient temperature and heat flux of the cask are estimated. These predicted data are within 10% of the experimental results. This study demonstrates that the transient adiabatic surface temperature of the pool fire can be used to predict the behavior of the thermal cask engulfed in an open pool fire.