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CFD Modeling of Smoke Reversal

Public Domain
File Language:
English


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  • Personal Author:
  • Corporate Authors:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Pittsburgh Research Laboratory
  • Description:
    In the design for a fire or smoke emergency, a main concern is maintaining an evacuation path that is free of smoke and hot gases. In ventilated tunnel fires, smoke and hot gases may form a layer near the ceiling and flow in the direction opposite to the ventilation stream. The existence of the reverse stratified flow has an important bearing on fire fighting and evacuation of underground mine roadways, tunnels, and building corridors. In the present study, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program is used as a design tool to model floor-level fires in a ventilated tunnel. The fire is simulated by a diffusion flame of propane issuing from a circular hole on the tunnel floor. The computed profiles of velocity and temperature along channel cross sections are similar to those obtained experimentally. The computed reverse-flow layer length has been correlated with a densimatric Froude number with some success. A non-dimensional parameter involving the source fire intensity is also used for the correlation. These analyses show that an appropriate ventilation air current must be maintained to provide an evacuation path from the source fire clear of smoke and hot gases. It is believed that CFD modeling, employed correctly and interpreted carefully, can be a useful design tool for fire protection.
  • Subjects:
  • Source:
    Proceedings of The International Conference on Engineered Fire Protection Design, ...Applying Fire Science to Fire Protection Problems, San Francisco, CA, June 11-15, 2001. Bethesda, MD: Society of Fire Protection Engineers, Inc., 2001 Jun; :376-387
  • Document Type:
    Text
  • Genre:
    Conference Publications
  • CIO:
    National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
  • NIOSHTIC Number:
    nn:20021337
  • Collection(s):
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:81ae3bb8906704200bbd6d8931cab4097e43e930d844f1048faec3a6252d5e240c50559d3845b3e82fe2422eb7cbb4c340018b1425b7276ab5a297747109bb4f
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 384.45 KB ]
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