Simulation of compartment fires ultilizing heat release histories received from scaled-down models of experiments

Simulations of direct burning of solid fuels for full-scale compartment fires require considerable amount of computational time due to the need of refining mesh grids. This paper presents a novel method for efficiently simulating the full-scale compartment fires with the inclusion of burning wood cribs using the scaling principles combined with the existing fire models. The approach consists of a method for scaling down the fuel and compartment and, in addition, of reconstruction rules considering the group effect of multiple cribs for establishing the surrogate HRRs needed. The applicability of the scaling laws and reconstruction method to simulate heat release rates and gas temperatures were numerically verified by full burning of multiple wood cribs in intermediate-scale compartments. The developed method can reduce the simulation time of large compartment fires including burning of solid fuels from a few months with a supercomputer to a few days by a desktop computer.