Physical experiments and Fire Dynamics Simulator simulations on gasoline pool fires

Abstract

Radiative properties such as temperature and emissive power distributions are very essential for fire safety measurements. The objective of this study is to characterize these distributions for a gasoline pool fire both experimentally and numerically. Infrared thermal camera is employed for the measurement of temperature distributions of gasoline open pool fires for pool diameters of 0.3, 0.5, 0.7 and 1.0 m. Incident heat flux upon a target is computed using the measured apparent temperature distribution and is validated with Schmidt–Boelter heat flux gauge measurements. Numerical studies are conducted using Fire Dynamics Simulator 5.5.3 version. Heat flux measured of target area is used to validate the numerical simulations with the experimental results. Centerline temperature distribution of numerical simulation and the temperature distribution from the experimental results are compared. It is observed that Fire Dynamics Simulator is capable of simulating the open pool fires even for complex fuels such as gasoline.