Modeling glass cooling mechanism with down-flowing water film via the smoothed particle hydrodynamics

Abstract

This paper presents a new attempt to investigate the cooling mechanism of glass panes with down-flowing water film during fire outbreak by simulating the heat energy conservation equation using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The nature of meshfree SPH method used allows us to predict the temperature distribution efficiently in continuous flow problems in contrast with mesh-based methods. To validate and show the efficiency of the proposed SPH model, the results from our simulation at specific conditions were compared with experimental measurements and results from commercial software packages. Furthermore, the new SPH model is utilized to simulate the effects of heat flux variation, down-flowing velocity and thickness of water film on temperature distribution of glass during fire. The developed SPH model is well able to describe glass cooling under different conditions. The computational results show that the rate of cooling increases when velocity or thickness of down-flowing water film increases. However, the glass temperature increases when heat flux increases.