An understanding of compartment fire behaviour is important for fire protection
engineers. For design purposes, whether to use a prescriptive code or performance
based design, life safety and property protection issues are required to be assessed. The
use of design fires in computer modelling is the general method to determine fire safety.
However these computer models are generally limited to the input of one design fire,
with consideration of the complex interaction between fuel packages and the
compartment environment being simplified. Of particular interest is the Heat Release
Rate, HRR, as this is the commonly prescribed design parameter for fire modelling. If
the HRR is not accurate then it can be subsequently argued that the design scenario may
be flawed. Therefore the selection of the most appropriate fire design scenario is
critical, and an increased level of understanding of compartment behaviour is an
invaluable aid to fire engineering assumptions.
This thesis details an experimental study to enhance the understanding of the impact and
interaction that the size and location of pool fires within an enclosure have upon the
compartment fire behaviour. Thirty four experiments were conducted in a reduced scale
compartment (½ height) with dimensions of 3.6m long by 2.4m wide by 1.2m high
using five typical ventilation geometries (fully open, soffit, door, window and small
window). Heptane pool fires were used, located in permutations of three evenly
distributed locations within the compartment (rear, centre and front) as well as larger
equivalent area pans located only in the centre. This thesis describes the experimental
development, setup and results of the experimental study. To assist in the classification
of compartment fire behaviour during the experiments, a ‘phi’ meter was developed to
measure the time dependent equivalence ratio. The phi meter was developed and
configured to measure O₂, CO₂ and CO. The background development, calibration, and
experimental results are reported. A review of compartment fire modelling using Fire
Dynamics Simulator, has also been completed and the results discussed.
The results of this experimental study were found to have significant implications for
Fire Safety Engineering in that the size of the fire is not as significant as the location of
the fire. The effect of a fire near the vent opening was found to have a significant impact
on compartment fire behaviour with the vent located fuel source increasing the total
compartment heat release rate by a factor of 1.7 to that of a centrally placed pool fire of
the same total fuel area. The assumption that a fire located in the centre of the room
provides for the highest heat release rate is not valid for post-flashover compartment
fires. The phi meter was found to provide good agreement with the equivalence ratio
calculated from total compartment mass loss rates, and the results of FDS modelling
indicate that the use of the model in its current form can not be applied to complex pool
fire geometries.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/3444 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Parkes, Anthony Richard |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Civil and Natural Resources Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Anthony Richard Parkes, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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