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LES soot-radiation predictions of buoyant fire plumes

2018 Spring Technical Meeting of the Western States Section of the Combustion Institute, WSSCI 2018

Koo, Heeseok K.; Hewson, John C.; Knaus, Robert C.

This study addresses predicting the internal thermochemical state in buoyant fire plumes using largeeddy simulations (LES) with a tabular flamelet library for the underlying flame chemistry. Buoyant fire plumes are characterized by moderate turbulent mixing, soot growth and oxidation and radiation transport. Soot moments, mixture fraction and enthalpy evolve in the LES with soot source terms given by the non-adiabatic flamelet library. Participating media radiation transport is predicted using the discrete ordinates method with source terms also from the flamelet library, and the LES subgrid-scale modeling is based on a one-equation kinetic-energy sub-filter model. This library is generated with flamelet states that include unsteady heat loss through extinction nominally representing radiative quenching. We describe the performance of this model both in the context of a laminar coflow configuration where extensive measurements are available and in buoyant turbulent fire plumes where measurements are more global.

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Rubble Fire Multi-Phase Model Development

Koo, Heeseok K.; Brown, Alexander B.; Voskuilen, Tyler V.; Pierce, Flint P.

This report presents multi-phase modeling approaches that are developed for simulating rubble fire scenarios similar to a large-scale rubble pool fire test at Sandia National Laboratories using composite materials and jet fuel. The rubble pool fire test burnt oddly shaped combustible solid objects submerged in liquid fuel. As an intermediate step toward a full scale rubble fire simulation, various model improvement tasks were performed. For modeling solid decomposition, a multi-step degradation model was used for canonical verification problems and the Chemical Percolation for Devolatilization (CPD) approach was implemented. Capabilities of Lagrangian particle approach has been extended such that a group of particles may represent a solid bulk. For gas-liquid interface, the volume of fluid (VOF) technique was implemented and relevant physics were added. The developed tools offer a potential for simulating three-phase (gas, liquid, and solid) combustion applications.

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Numerical study of pyrolysis and combustion of a carbon fiber-epoxy composite

10th U.S. National Combustion Meeting

Koo, Heeseok K.; Brown, Alexander B.; Voskuilen, Tyler V.; Pierce, Flint P.

With growing use of carbon fiber-epoxy in transportation systems, it is important to understand fire reaction properties of the composite to ensure passenger safety. Recently, a micro-scale pyrolysis study and macro-scale fire tests were performed using carbon fiber-epoxy at Sandia National Laboratories. Current work focuses on numerical modeling of the material conversion, pyrolysis, and gas-phase combustion that replicate the experiments. Large-eddy simulations (LES) and eddy-dissipation concept (EDC) approach are incorporated in the gas phase along with multiple relevant reaction model methods in the solid phase. The numerical methods that use multi-step pyrolysis rate expressions are validated by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) results. The pyrolyzed fuel components participate in gas-phase combustion using a turbulent combustion model. The multi-phase combustion capability was further assessed using two cases: a single particle reaction and a solid panel exposed to strong radiant heat. The panel fire test indicates that the model accurately reproduces panel temperature profile while a weaker oxidation is predicted.

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14 Results
14 Results