Temperature evolution within fire compartment, external flame structure characteristic and merging behavior with multiple-openings

Xiepeng Sun, Fei Ren, Xiaotao Chen, Yu Han, Xiaolei Zhang, Fei Tang, Congling Shi and Longhua Hu

Applied Energy, 2024, vol. 373, issue C, No S0306261924012388

Abstract: Building external walls and fire insulation are important components of a low carbon economy. Once a fire occurs in the building, the ejected flame from the opening of the building can easily ignite the building external wall insulation materials and further resulting the catastrophic large-scale facade fire. The paper investigates experimentally the temperature evolution within fire compartment, the external flame merging behavior and the structure characteristic (height/area) ejected through multiple-openings comprehensively for various numbers of openings and separation distances (with a fixed overall opening size) and fire heat release rates with a total of 272 conditions. A rectangle reduced-scale fire compartment and an external facade was designed with various multi-opening conditions (numbers of openings, separations). Results show that the upper-part temperature within fire compartment first increases and then changes a little around 1000 K, it is correlated well by the heat release rate and heat loss per unit time for over-ventilated conditions, while it correlated well with the opening factor for under-ventilated condition. Regardless of the number of openings, it only depends on the overall opening size. The external flame merging probability increases (from 0 to 1) with increasing number of openings and fire HRR, which correlated well as a function of the non-merging flame height from a single opening (or the flame upward velocity) and the separation distances between the adjacent two openings. The external flame height decreases (about from 1.0 m to 0.3 m) with increasing number of openings. A new characteristic length scale, considering the multiple rectangle fire sources at the neutral plane was proposed to describe the external flame height. The external flame area is further estimated based on the flame height and the merging probability. The experimental data and correlations obtained in this paper contribute a fundamental basis for quantifying the characteristics of the building fire, selection of building external wall insulation materials and building energy saving.

Keywords: Facade fire; Temperature evolution; Multiple-openings; Flame merging probability; Flame structure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2024.123855

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