Numerical field model simulation of fire and heat transfer in a rectangular compartment

Abstract

Shipboard fires have been the bane of mariners since man's earliest attempts to sail the sea. Understanding the behavior of fire in an enclosed space such as those found on today's modern seagoing vessels will greatly enhance the mariner's ability to combat or prevent them. In a joint effort between the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Notre Dame a computer code has been developed to model a full scale fire in a closed compartment. The code uses finite volume formulation to obtain numerical solutions to the unsteady, three-dimensional conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy. Included are the effects of turbulence, strong buoyancy, surface radiation and wall conduction. The code gives velocities, pressure, temperatures and densities throughout the field. This thesis applies that computer code to the U.S. Navy's full scale fire test chamber at Naval Air Warfare Center, China Lake, California. Advance computer graphics techniques, including color contouring and three dimensional vector field plotting have been applied to make output more informative. It is hoped that someday this model could provide a useful tool for naval architects in the design of a fire safe ship, and a cost effective means for developing/evaluation of new firefighting equipment and techniques.