Ethanol pool fire on a one-meter test tray – validation of CFD results

The ethanol fire hazards will become more frequent due to the new established targets for the consumption of renewable energy sources. With this in mind, this paper aims to widen the current knowledge on CFD modelling of such a fire. As previous works rely heavily on the data of small pool fire diameters (below 1 m), this research deals with ethanol pool fire on a one-meter test tray, using our own experimental data. A mathematical model was developed and solved using a commercial CFD package (ANSYS Fluent). A new hybrid RANS-LES (SBES) model was employed to calculate turbulent stresses. Generally, the simulation results showed a good fit with the experimental results for flame temperatures at different elevations. In particular, a minor discrepancy was only observed for the top thermocouple (1.9 m above the tray). The flame heights computed with the CFD model were on average higher than the experimental one. Good agreement was observed for the radiative fraction and the axial temperature profile on the plume centreline. The latter showed an almost perfect fit between the temperature profiles obtained from CFD simulations and those calculated from the plume law for temperature.