Numerical Study on Small-Scale Fire Whirl using Large Eddy Simulation

Fire whirl is a rotating fire with either a fixed or revolving flame centre-core caused by unbalanced entrainment. In general, the flame height of a fire whirl is significantly larger than that of a free standing fire. It is suggested by several studies that fire whirl is a disastrous scenario especially in urban or bush fires since it can greatly promote the fire spread and escalate the thread to human lives and species. In this paper, as a preliminary study, the fire whirl behaviour has been studied numerically using the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) ver 6.1.2 which is based on the large eddy simulation (LES). It incorporates the mixture fraction based combustion model along with soot formation, the subgrid-scale (SGS) turbulence model, radiation transfer equation (RTE) model which are fully coupled and interactive. This allows the modelling of all essential chemical and physical behaviours that occur during the fire whirling processes. A small-scale vertical shaft with a base of 0.34 m × 0.35 m with a total vertical height of 1.45 m is considered. The development stages including the ignition, flame-rising and fully-developed fire whirling are modelled successfully through numerical simulations. Fairly good agreements between simulation and experimental results for temperature profiles at the centreline and corner thermocouples are achieved. However, a flame height of 0.3 m to 0.4 m is estimated in the simulation while the experimental observation is around 0.6 m. Also, the temperature is slightly over-predicted at the centre while under-predicted at the corner. These could well be due to the simplified chemistry employed in the FDS. With this preliminary numerical study, it could be logically inferred that the detailed chemical reactions scheme may be needed to capture the fundamental governing characteristics of the fire whirl in future numerical modelling studies.