The Characteristic Analysis of Oil Pool Fire Phenomena for Fire Safety Design in Engine Room

Abstract

In the fire safety design for a ship, the engine room fire due to flammable oils is a very important issue and has received much attention in recent years. However, the nature of the engine room fire is still not well understood due to its extreme complexity of the physical and chemical mechanisms. A series researches have been carried out by the authors to investigate the engine room fire, and the emphasis of the present study is placed on the emission and the movement of the smoke during oil burning, which is very important phenomenon for a successful fire safe design such as setting up escape routes and installing fire detectors.In the present work, at first an oil burning experiment in a box-typed compartment, which is a simplified engine room fire model, is conducted on oxygen rich conditions to investigate the distinctive features of the smoke emission and the smoke movement for such type of engineer room fires. From the experiments, several types of quantitative relation between the oil burning rate and the smoke generating rate are obtained. Then a three-dimensional numerical analysis using k-ε based CFD model is performed to investigate the detailed turbulent heat and smoke diffusion phenomena for the experimental model. Both experimental and numerical results are believed to be useful in designing more effective evacuation systems and more reasonable smoke sensor arrangement.