ISI BILIMI VE TEKNIGI DERGISI-JOURNAL OF THERMAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, cilt.42, sa.1, ss.123-137, 2022 (SCI-Expanded)
n-heptane pool fire was numerically and experimentally investigated in a 1:100 scaled metro station. Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS v6.7.5) has been applied to investigate smoke and temperature distribution by implementing different design curves in the station. Experimental and numerical studies were performed for 10 ml n-heptane fuel under zero piston effect. To develop performance-based design and to obtain reliable fire simulation results for structures, reasonable input conditions are essential for numerical studies. The aim of the study is to select most suitable fire design curve and make the numerical study independent of the experimental results for small scale hydrocarbon pool fires. In this study, t(2), tanh, Eurocode 1 (BS EN 1991-1-2), exponential, and quadratic fire curves were investigated and validated with experimental results. The numerical results obtained using FDS were validated with experimental data and good agreement was observed for all design fire curves except quadratic one. It was observed that the exponential design fire curve predicted more similarly to the experimental data over the fire duration including growth, fully developed and decay phases. Regardless of the experimental results, it was seen that the temperature distribution results obtained from the numerical study using exponential fire design curve and the radiation / turbulence parameters obtained from the literature were found to have an average of 5% difference with the experimental results. It was also seen that the t(2) and tanh curves have acceptable differences of 6.92% and 9.02%, respectively, and the Eurocode HC is less suitable than the other curves with a difference of 12.17%. Therefore, it can be said that in small scale hydrocarbon pool fires, fire design can be done using exponential design curve.