Evaluation of CFD simulations of transient pool fire burning rates

Fire is the most commonly occurring major accident hazard in the chemical and process industries, with industry accident statistics highlighting the liquid pool fire as the most frequent fire event. Modelling of such phenomena feeds heavily into industry risk assessment and consequence analyses. Traditional simple empirical equations cannot account for the full range of factors influencing pool fire behaviour or increasingly complex plant design. The use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling enables a greater understanding of pool fire behaviour to be gained numerically and provides the capability to deal with complex scenarios.

This paper presents an evaluation of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) for predictive modelling of liquid pool fire burning rates. Specifically, the work examines the ability of the model to predict temporal variations in the burning rate of open atmosphere pool fires. Fires ranging from 0.4 to 4 m in diameter, involving ethanol and a range of liquid hydrocarbons as fuels, are considered and comparisons of predicted fuel mass loss rates are compared to experimental measurements.

The results show that the liquid pyrolysis sub-model in FDS gives consistent model performance for fully predictive modelling of liquid pool fire burning rates, particularly during quasi-steady burning. However, the model falls short of predicting the subtleties associated with each phase of the transient burning process, failing to reliably predict fuel mass loss rates during fire growth and extinction. The results suggest a range of model modifications which could lead to improved prediction of the transient fire growth and extinction phases of burning for liquid pool fires, specifically, investigation of: ignition modelling techniques for high boiling temperature liquid fuels; a combustion regime combining both infinite and finite-rate chemistry; a solution method which accounts for two- or three-dimensional heat conduction effects in the liquid-phase; alternative surrogate fuel compositions for multi-component hydrocarbon fuels; and modification of the solution procedure used at the liquid-gas interface during fire extinction.