Inert Wall Thermal Feedback - Validation Study

CFD modelling of fire spread in solid materials remains an ongoing challenge within the fire safety community. To simulate fire spread, many physical and chemical processes such as mass and heat transfer, combustion and pyrolysis have to be solved and most importantly validated over experimental data. Remaining challenge in the field of fire spread modelling are the material property data. Material properties are usually measured or inferred and also calibrated/validated from microscale or small scale experiments. The presented contribution is a work in progress with the long-term goal to provide real scale validation data and material properties for the problem of flame spread over a vertical wall covered with engineered wood products (EWPs). As a first step, thermal feedback from the burner to the inert wall is studied both experimentally and computationally. The presented validation data were obtained from an experiment conducted in a standard Room corner test facility (ISO 9705-1), where a 2 x 2 meter inert board was located in the middle of the test room with the propane burner placed at the foot of the board. The front and back board temperatures, gas temperatures and net heat flux to the board were measured. The model was performed in FDS software, including the grid sensitivity study to validate the thermal feedback from a simple propane burner flame on the board without the influence of pyrolysis and pyrolysis gases combustion.