Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Post-Test Computations of the Virginia Tech Propane Fire Compartment Study Using FDS v2

Published

Author(s)

J E. Floyd, C J. Wieczorek, U Vandsburger

Abstract

A successful simulation of compartment fires using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) must be able to adequately model three significant phenomena: the combustion of fuel, the mixing caused by the buoyancy of hot gasses, and the removal of heat from the gas phase by radiative transport. Unfortunately, these phenomena span a tremendous range of length and time scales. Combustion occurs at tiny length scales, whereas the mixing and radiative transport occur at the compartment length scale. In practical terms radiation heat transfer is instantaneous whereas the combustion process and the hydrodynamic transport of mass and energy is not. Given the current state of technology it is impractical to perform a meaningful calculation at the smallest required length and time scales.
Citation
IAFSS Symposium

Keywords

compartment fire, fire modeling, underventilated fire

Citation

Floyd, J. , Wieczorek, C. and Vandsburger, U. (2017), Post-Test Computations of the Virginia Tech Propane Fire Compartment Study Using FDS v2, IAFSS Symposium (Accessed July 19, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created February 19, 2017