Numerical Investigations on Water Mist Fire Extinguishing Performance: Physical and Sensitivity Analysis

Abstract

Fire safety is a changing science for which the dominant parameters that affect fire suppression are still not well defined. The aim of this work is to show that sensitivity analysis techniques can speed up and improve the design process of fire suppression experiments by water mists. The important parameters that play a role in the performance of water mists were confirmed using the CFD code FDS. Various sensitivity analysis methods based on the factorial design and variance decomposition are used with four input parameters (flow rate, spray cone angle, discharge duration and droplet diameter). In our case, results highlight the importance of the discharge duration for the performance of water mists in a confined environment and a strong non-linear effect of the spray cone angle on temperature when variance decomposition methods are used. Further works will be conducted in order to confirm that sensitivity analysis can be used for application in fire suppression by water mist.