Andrej Horvat presents work on flashover at the EBECC 2008 Conference - June 2008
A modelling approach was developed to simulate fire spread from combusting gases to a solid surface material. The development work was performed at ANSYS Europe Ltd. as a part of the EC funded Firenet project, which investigated phenomena related to under-ventilated fires.
The motivation to develop a fire spread model and to link it to the ANSYS CFD package was the need to obtain a reliable computational tool for solid material ignition under fire conditions, subsequent pyrolysis and combustion. The objective was to develop a fire spread model that could be linked to the ANSYS CFD package and hence used in fire safety engineering as well as in industrial applications (e.g. for combustion of solid fuels). Alternative approaches to this modelling are also being explored at ANSYS Europe Ltd.
The computational model was validated by using experimental data from CNRS-ENSMA-Poitiers. In their case, a propane burner with thermal power of 55 kW was used as a primary source of fire and square beech wood samples (30 mm x 30 mm x 5 mm) as fire spread targets. The comparison of the calculated and the experimentally measured temperatures shows a good agreement for solid material samples closer to the main fire source where the model predicts the ignition time very well. For the samples further away from the main fire source, the differences are larger (the authors believe due to geometrical simplifications), which are discussed in the paper. In general, the performance of the developed fire spread model is satisfactory although caution is needed in its application due to sensitivity to material properties and geometrical simplifications.
