Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A high-resolution, 3-D finite-difference numerical study is performed on interactions of natural convection and surface/gas/soot radiation in a differentially heated cubical enclosure, which may be regarded as a simplified model for compartment fires. A robust gas/soot radiation model used in the analysis is based on the PI-differential approximation method and the weighted sum of gray gas model. The 3-D characteristics of the thermal and flow fields are examined in detail by the state-of-the-art 3-D numerical visualization techniques. The effects of each mode of radiation are described. Overall, radiation is found to enhance the three-dimensionalities of the fields.