Fire and smoke distribution in a two-room compartment structure

This paper presents a comparison of numerical predictions employing a Computational Fluid Dynamics fire model against a series of turbulent buoyant fire experiments recently carried out in a two-room compartment structure by Nielsen and Fleischmann at the University of Canterbuty, New Zealand. The model incorporates turbulence, combustion, soot generation and radiation due to a fire. An evaluation of the various approaches-volumetric heat source approach or a more sophisticated handling the fire through a combustion model-is carried out. The effect of radiation due to combustion products and soot is also investigated. The model considering combustion with radiation contribution by both the combustion products and soot provides the best agreement between the predicted results and measured data. The presence of soot is seen to significantly augment the global radiation process within the two-compartment enclosure.