Structure of Medium-Scale Pool Fires

A series of experiments are reported that characterize key features of the structure of eight medium-scale pool fires (0.3 m to 0. 4 m) steadily burning a variety of liquid and gaseous fuel types, including 30 cm diameter liquid pool fires burning methanol, ethanol, acetone and heptane, and 37 cm diameter methane (34 kW) and propane (20 kW, 34 kW, and 50 kW) gaseous pool fires. The measurements and their uncertainty help establish a data repository for use in the rigorous evaluation of computational fluid dynamics fire models. Steadily burning liquid and gaseous pool fires were established on water-cooled burners. After a 5 min to 10 min warm-up period, global and local measurements of the fires were conducted. The global measurements reported here include flame height, puffing frequency, mass burning rate, heat release rate, CO and soot yields, radiative fraction, and total heat feedback fraction to the burner. The local measurements reported here include the profiles of radiative and total heat flux onto the liquid pool surface, the radiative heat flux distribution to an array of flux gauges forming a cylindrical control surface around the fire, the fuel surface temperature, indepth temperature at select locations inside the liquid pools, and the vertical and temperature centerline profiles above the fuel surface. In summary, the measurement results provide a comprehensive data set for the evaluation of computational fire models and offer insight on the complex structure of medium-scale pool fires.