Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Although fire whirls in large urban fires are known to cause many fire victims and extensive property damages, detailed mechanisms and physical effects of fire whirls still remain largely unknown, since real big fire whirls are relatively rare and their studies are too difficult to carry out. However, such large-scale fire whirls, until recently, can be conveniently studied by computer-based numerical simulation techniques. On the other hand, computer simulations for large-scale phenomena are only realistic if they can be validated in advance by the results of scale-modeled experiments. Despite recent studies in this regard, uncertainties of the whirling-fire phenomena are still abound. The purpose of this study was to compare quantitatively the fire-whirl temperature and velocity fields of the numerical simulations with those from laboratory experiments for the case of fire whirls generated with a single flame located in a vertical square channel with symmetrical corner gaps. Successful results of such comparisons have been obtained.