Validation of Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) for pool fire in large enclosures

In this paper, computational fluid dynamics has been used for simulating an experimental pool fire within a natural ventilated room. In the experiment, carried out by the Technical Research Institute of Finland, 4.9 kilograms of heptane have been burned in a room 10 m wide, 10 m long and 5 m high with natural ventilation through an open window. This scenario has been simulated by resorting to Fire Dynamic Simulator (Version 6) with different meshes to assess the influence of the grid size on the numerical results. In order to assess the flow field inside the room, the pool fire has been initially modeled by imposing the mass loss from the pool obtained from the experiment. Then, the evaporation process from the liquid pool has also been modeled in order to evaluate the mass loss also. In both cases, the temperatures, chemical species concentrations and smoke layer height in the surrounding of the fire, obtained from the simulation have been compared with the results of the experiments using functional analysis.