On the behaviour of the temperature field around pool fires in controlled experiment and numerical modelling

Abstract This paper attempts to evaluate how the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) correlates with experimental flame heights and temperature profiles around a small scale pool fire. Experimental studies were conducted in a 6 cm diameter burner inside an exhaustion hood with three liquid fuels largely used in industry: commercial hexane, hydrous ethanol and type C gasoline. The simulated fuels were defined as mixture of molecules from FDS fuel library. The burning rates were prescribed in the calculation routine and compared with the results when the burning rate is predicted by the simulator. FDS predicts flame heights with errors below 16% when the burning rate is prescribed as boundary condition. Good agreement with experimental data is observed for a given number of probe locations. However, FDS struggled to describe the temperature profile around the flame area in the region close to the pool rim, between X/D = 0.25 and X/D = 0.75, and with heights below 5.0 diameters.