A field modeling approach to prediction of hot gas movement induced by marine compartment fires

Predicting smoke flow movements in marine and offshore compartment fires is still a challenging endeavor for fire safety researchers. The research described in this paper is an effort to apply the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to numerically simulate such smoke flows. The present computational model involves a CFD code to solve 3-dimensional turbulent buoyancy-driven flows using a set of low-Mach-number approximated governing equations, a turbulence model based on large eddy simulation, and a combustion model to calculate the heat release rate from fires. A pool fire is simulated and the results are compared to the measured data of a laboratory experiment. A simulation of an engine room fire on a coastal LPG ship is also presented as an example of applications.