Modeling of Compartment Fire

Abstract

Fire accident in a containment is a serious threat to nuclear reactors. Fire can cause substantial loss to life and property. The risk posed by fire can also exceed the risk from internal events within a nuclear reactor. Numerous research efforts have been performed to understand and analyze the phenomenon of fire in nuclear reactor and its consequences. Modeling of fire is an important subject in the field of fire safety engineering. Two ap- proaches which are commonly used in fire modeling are zonal modeling and field model- ing. The objective of this work is to compare zonal and field modeling approach against a pool fired experiment performed in a well-confined compartment.Numerical simulations were performed against experiments, which were conducted within PRISME program under the framework of OECD. In these experiments, effects of ventila- tion flow rate on heat release rate in a confined and mechanically ventilated compartment is investigated. Time dependent changes in gas temperature and oxygen mass fraction were measured. The trends obtained by numerical simulation performed using zonal model and field model compares well with experiments. Further validation is needed before this code can be used for fire safety analyses.