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Effects of Fuel Depth and Pan Wall Material for Unsteady Pool Fires with Different Fuels

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Abstract

With the aim of providing a generalized dimensionless correlation for pan fuel burn fluxes, this work treats all the earlier work in this area and the data on specific experiments on a small pool fire performed in this study with fuels namely, kerosene, diesel, methanol and ethanol. The experiments were performed in stainless steel and mild steel pans of 0.2 m diameter and 40 mm depth with fuel depths up to 20 mm without water in an indoor fire laboratory. Data on temporal evolution of mass burn, pan wall temperatures, fuel temperatures and gas phase temperatures at specific height from the fuel surface have been obtained from the experiments and the behavior of the burn process has been delineated. The dimensionless correlation of the pool burn flux as a function of the geometric and thermodynamic properties of the pan and thermo-chemical properties of the fuels developed for n-heptane by the present authors recently has been examined for its validity for other fuels and shown to be good to with in ± 5% for the range of fuels, pan diameters and fuel depths.

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Abbreviations

Al, GL :

Aluminum alloy and glass

\(d_{pan}\) :

Pan diameter (m)

\(h_{pan}, h_{fu}\) :

Pan height, fuel depth (m)

\(h_{fb}, h_{wr}\) :

Free board and water depth (m)

\(h_{g,conv}\) :

Gas phase convective heat transfer coefficient (\(\mathrm{kW}/\mathrm{m}^2 \,\mathrm{K}\))

\(L_{fu}\) :

Latent heat of vaporization of the fuel (kJ/kg)

\(k_w\) :

Thermal conductivity of pan material (kW/m K)

\(\bar{\dot{m}}_{fu}^{\prime \prime }\) :

Mean mass flux (\(\mathrm{g}/\mathrm{m}^2\,\mathrm{s}\))

\(M_{pc}\) :

Dimensionless pan burn number

MS, SS :

Mild steel, stainless steel

\(P_1, P_2, P_3\) :

Dimensionless parameters as in Eqs. 1–3

\(T_f, T_s, T_{bfu}\) :

Flame and fuel surface temperatures and fuel boiling point (K)

\(\rho _{fu}\) :

Fuel density (\(\mathrm{kg}/\mathrm{m}^3\))

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the authorities of Jain (Deemed to be)university for encouragement in the conduct of this research and we would like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments which helped us in improving the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fire and Combustion Research Centre, Jain (Deemed to be) University, Kanakapura Road, Bangalore, India

    A. Shiva Kumar, H. S. Mukunda & C. S. Bhaskar Dixit

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  1. A. Shiva Kumar
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  2. H. S. Mukunda
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  3. C. S. Bhaskar Dixit
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Correspondence to A. Shiva Kumar.

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Kumar, A.S., Mukunda, H.S. & Dixit, C.S.B. Effects of Fuel Depth and Pan Wall Material for Unsteady Pool Fires with Different Fuels. Fire Technol 58, 41–52 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10694-021-01159-1

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