Abstract
•9 mm smallest cell size ensures grid independence, resolves ∼70% of RMS temperature.•Comparable accuracy and CPU times between nongrey WSGG and box model.•Newer oxyfuel WSGG models are slower and not more accurate for fire applications.•TRI modeling required to avoid relative radiant power loss of ∼40% at pool surface.•Pool surface radiation very sensitive to subgrid temperature fluctuation modeling.
Non-grey radiation modelling of gas-phase combustion products is performed during runtime of large eddy simulations (LES) of 30 cm, 20 kW methanol pool fires, based on the experiments of Klassen and Gore [4] and Weckman and Strong [38]. FireFOAM, the turbulent flame solver part of open source CFD platform OpenFOAM®, was modified to include a new array of gas radiation models. Two grey and three non-grey implementations of the weighted-sum-of-grey-gases (WSGG) are compared in terms of both accuracy and CPU efficiency, along with a 'box' model based on the exponential wide band model (EWB) but specially optimised for fire scenarios. Turbulence-radiation interactions (TRI) are taken into account for the self-correlation of temperature in the emission term of the radiative transfer equation (RTE). Non-grey WSGG models consistently performed better than their grey counterparts, but the two newer WSGG correlations based on up-to-date spectral databases did not perform noticeably better or worse than the older WSGG model, which is a departure from other studies in oxy-fuel conditions. The work also showed that TRI is very important for the accurate prediction of the pool surface radiant feedback and the total radiant output. Some recommendations are made for the fire and radiation community.