Experimental study on flame radiant heat flux from two heptane storage pools and its application to estimating safety distance

Huaxian Wan, Zihe Gao, Jie Ji and Yongming Zhang

Energy, 2019, vol. 182, issue C, 11-20

Abstract: This paper presents an experimental study on flame radiant heat fluxes from two identical pool fires in still air. The pool side length and spacing were changed. The fuel mass loss, flame height and radiative heat fluxes onto vertical targets far away from the fires were measured. A new method based on the weighted multi-point source model (WMP model) was developed to calculate the thermal radiation by determining the weight of each point source using the flame volume fraction. Results showed that both the SPS (single point source) and WMP models can well predict the radiative heat fluxes when the targets are located in the middle of two pools. For targets shifting from the centers of two pools, the SPS model will overestimate the radiative heat fluxes, while the accuracy of WMP model is much better. For the typical storage tank with 20 cm diameter, it is estimated that the heat flux received by the target located 30 m away from the edge of storage tank is 20.8 kW/m2 using the proposed WMP model. And the acceptable safety distance of people (heat flux at the critical value of 1.4 kW/m2) exposed to the same storage tank fire is 166 m.

Keywords: Energy security; Multiple pool fires; Flame height; Multi-point source model; Radiative heat flux; Safety distance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219311284
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:182:y:2019:i:c:p:11-20

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.06.006

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().