Soot production modelling for operational computational fluid dynamics fire simulations

Abstract

With the aim of minimising the losses produced by fire accidents, fire engineering applies physics and engineering principles to preserve the integrity of people, environment and infrastructure. Fire modelling is complex due to the interaction between chemistry, heat transfer and fluid dynamics. Commercially available simulation tools necessarily simplify this complexity, excluding less fundamental processes, such as soot production. By not including this compound in the simulations, the interactions of radiation heat transfer, fire propagation and toxicity must be approximated based on input parameters that are often not well defined. In this work, two semi-empirical soot models are incorporated in the fire dynamics simulator. The models are compared against experimental data. For the operational viability in large-scale scenarios, a correction factor for the local variables is proposed as a function of the cell size, achieving good agreement with experimental data in terms of the amount of soot generated.