PROGRESS ON WATER MIST EVAPORATION MODEL BASED ON EULERIAN SPRAY DESCRIPTION

ABSTRACT Water mist fire protection strategies applied to road and subway tunnels are arousing considerable interest in recent years because of their high potential in fire control and suppression. The influence of ventilation can reduce or enhance the residence time of droplets influencing their global evaporation rate and affecting smoke propagation. This paper describes our effort to provide a numerical model based on the Eulerian Spray description to support the lack of expensive experiments at design stage, allowing parametric studies to compare different solutions, with strong simplifications in order to reduce the computational costs. PDA technique is used to characterize the industrial nozzle object of this study and to obtain an estimation of input values. Measurements show that, at least for some kind of nozzle, a monodispersed distribution should be reasonable to reconstruct well the flow field, preventing the need for a complete multi-fluid treatment.