Preliminary CFD analysis of a ventilated chamber for candles testing

As candles have grown in popularity with consumers over the last few years, so has the potential safety concern with their use in indoor environments. Carbon monoxide, particulate matter and different volatile and semi-volatile species can be found in candles emissions. Currently it is not possible to predict theoretically which emissions will be produced by a specific candle and in order to quantify real emissions is still necessary to proceed with experimental tests. A common way to quantify released pollutants is to burn candles in a well-controlled environment, such as a laboratory-scale test chambers. Obviously, it is required that these chambers are able to reproduce the environmental combustion regime of the candles, so as to guarantee that an equal level of emissions is produced and measured. Another crucial point is related to the measurements themselves: generally, air quality is measured in a single point inside the chamber with the assumption that the air and the exhausts in that point are representative of the whole ambient. This work aims to reproduce one of these chambers by means of a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) model, with the purpose of obtaining an adequate tool to analyze and design more efficient test chambers. A comparison with an ad hoc experiment is performed to validate the CFD model.