doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7724-8_03-07

ABSTRACT

The flame spread behavior of Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) is studied in the parallel panel geometry experimentally and numerically. The experimental apparatus consists of two 0.6 m wide and 2.4 m high panels rigidly clamped to a 0.3 × 0.6 m 60 kW sand burner. The test specimen (3.18 mm thick PMMA) is mounted on both panels and the panel/burner assembly is placed under a 5 MW fire products collector. Numerical modeling of the flame propagation in this system is carried out using a newly developed code for fire modeling: FireFOAM. The gas phase fluid dynamics is described using the large eddy simulation (LES) technique and the combustion is described by the mixture fraction based approach. A finite volume implementation of the discrete ordinates method (FVDOM) is used to describe the radiation from the flame in conjunction with a laminar smoke point based soot model. Pyrolysis of the material is described by a 1-D, finite rate (Arrhenius kinetics) pyrolysis model which is coupled back with the gas phase in the form of boundary conditions for the temperature, mixture fraction and velocities. An optimization procedure is used to extract solid material properties from bench-scale experiments carried out using the Fire Propagation Apparatus (FPA). Simulated and measured heat release rate, heat fluxes and temperatures are found to agree quantitatively, with the deviations being close to the uncertainty of the test data.

Keywords: Parallel panel, Upward flame spread, PMMA, FireFOAM.

© 2011 CPD Unit, University of Leeds