Modelling study of the spread of liquid fuel spill fires using shallow water equations

Abstract

In oil spill–fire accidents, the spread of burning fuel from petroleum product containers may increase accident losses and trigger further accidents. Studying the spreading process of spill fires is important to prevent accidents and mitigate losses. Herein, a spill-fire spread model was proposed to predict the spread rate and time varying burning area of liquid fuel spill fires. The model was developed using one-dimensional nonlinear shallow water equations. Fuel consumption was used as the source term in the equations. To ensure numerical stability and accuracy, the third-order TVD Runge–Kutta method and the second-order MUSCL scheme were used for time advancement and numerical space reconstruction, respectively. Numerical flux was calculated by using the HLL approximate Riemann solver. The algorithm of the shallow water equations was modified in accordance with the spread characteristics of spill fires. Using the developed spread model, the dynamic burning area and dynamic fuel thickness of a spill fire were calculated. The simulation results were verified using the experimental results on continuously released n-heptane spill fires, and the two results were in good agreement.