Abstract
A fully coupled fluid–solid approach has been developed within FireFOAM 2.2.x, a large eddy simulation (LES) based fire simulation solver within the OpenFOAM® toolbox. Due consideration has been given to couple the radiative heat transfer and soot treatment with pyrolysis calculations. Combustion is modeled using the newly extended eddy dissipation concept (EDC) for the LES published by the authors’ group. Soot formation and oxidation are handled by the published extension of the laminar smoke point concept to turbulent fires using the partially stirred reactor (PaSR) concept also from the authors’ group. The gases radiation properties are evaluated using the established weighted sum of grey gas model while soot absorption coefficient is calculated using a single Planck-mean absorption coefficient. The effect of in-depth radiation is treated with the relatively simple Beer's law and the solid surface regression length is calculated from the local pyrolysis rate. Systematic validation studies have been conducted with several published experiments including simple pyrolysis test without the gaseous region, small scale wall fires and large scale flame spread. The predictions are in very good agreement with the relevant experimental data, demonstrating that the present modeling approach can be used to predict upward flame spread over PMMA with reasonable accuracy. Further parametric studies have also been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the present modifications to capture the underlying physics. The detailed field predictions for vortex structures and flame volume including laminar–turbulent transition have also been analysed to uncover further insight of the unsteady flame spread phenomena. Potentially, the model can be used to aid further fundamental studies of the flame spread phenomena such as investigating the effects of width, inclination angles and side walls on flame spread as well as the predictions of flame spread in practical applications.