University of the Punjab Conference Portal, 2nd International Conference on Engineering Sciences

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Numerical Investigation of fire whirls
Aiman Fatima, Muhammad Asim Ibrahim, Ahtisham Arshad

Last modified: 2015-11-10

Abstract


Fire whirls have been focused of fire community not only due to its beauty but also due to its disastrous nature. In past performance of fire whirls have been studied but in a qualitative way and still it could be stated that they are not fully understood because of their complex nature.  In industrial storages whirls formation is quite common. This research project demonstrates qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of fire whirls in view of entrainment channels, height of side structures and distance between center of fire source and side structures. FDS was employed as CFD tool and 15 CFD models were developed to see the influence of these parameters in a systematic way. It was found that gap fraction and height had maximum effect on flame height, radius, temperature and velocity. Furthermore it was noted that a difference of vorticity strength between 0.25m and 1.45m height increases with increasing gap fraction for both combustion and non-combustion zones. Regression modeling was done to fit the model on the observed data and the most significant factors in every model were screened out. Moreover, recommendations were given to minimize the risk of formation of fire whirls.