Local contributions of resolved and subgrid turbulence-radiation interaction in LES/presumed FDF modelling of large-scale methanol pool fires

Abstract

The present study aims to quantify individual contributions to turbulence-radiation interaction (TRI) in LES of large methanol pool fires with diameters ranging from 1m to 4m. These simulations feature a steady laminar flamelet (SLF)/presumed Filtered Density Function (FDF) combustion model and the Rank Correlated Full Spectrum k-distribution (RC FSK) for spectral gas radiation. This quantification has a fundamental interest to, on the one hand, understand how these contributions affect the radiative heat transfer from the flame to the surroundings that controls fire growth in industrial fires and, on the other hand, to provide guidance for the development of simplified models for TRI. This analysis is accomplished by exercising a well-validated fire model and using a scaling strategy that preserves the relative contributions of resolved-scale and subgrid-scale (SGS) scalar fluctuations. Large-scale non-luminous pool fires feature large optical thicknesses that increase significantly with the pool diameter. As a result, applying the optically-thin fluctuation approximation (OTFA) leads to a noticeable overestimation of the global radiative loss. The fire plume dynamics is governed by the puffing process whose frequency decreases with the pool size, and, in turn, affects the levels of turbulent intensity. As a result, emission TRI increases in the continuous flame and decreases in the high intermittent flame regions. The contribution of SGS emission TRI to global emission TRI becomes progressively dominant as the pool size increases. The largest contributions to both resolved-scale and SGS emission TRI are the temperature self-correlation and the absorption coefficient-temperature cross correlation, although this latter becomes negligible at the subgrid scale for pool diameters larger than 1m. In addition, the SGS absorption-coefficient self-correlation is also found to be negligible.