An Engineering Tool for Evaluation of Fire Suppression System Performance

Published in: Innovation in Education and Inclusion : Proceedings of the 16th LACCEI International Multi-Conference for Engineering, Education and Technology
Date of Conference: July 18-20, 2018
Location of Conference: Lima, Perú
Authors: Andres Valencia Correa (Department of Fire Protection Engineering, US)
Howard R. Baum (Department of Fire Protection Engineering, US)
André W. Marhsall (Department of Fire Protection Engineering, US)
Full Paper: #453

Abstract:

In this paper is presented a description of a new engineering tool for evaluation of water-based fire suppression system (sprinklers), based on a high fidelity description of initial characteristics of the jet (sphere initialization from 4S device). The proposed model has three principal innovative advantages over classical Lagrangian approach: i) Speed: Fast calculation of the spray anywhere; ii) Description of the spray in the phase space, which turns the description of the spray into a time-independent, enabling compact, fast, and useful reconstruction of the spray; iii) Description of the spray as a set of 2D spray dispersion fields allowing considerable simplification of the spray field analysis. As results, a 2D visualization of the spray (volume flux), and an example of volume flux into a surface are reported.