Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A series of small scale and medium scale experiments were conducted to investigate the mass flow rates of buoyant jet plumes originating at wall openings from a fire space. From the results of the experiments, it was found that: (1)an opening jet plume can be modeled into n vertical plume as long as the mass flow rate is concerned provided that the entrainment height is adequately adjusted by the height of the plume virtual origin; (2)the height at which the mass flow rate of the vertical plume model becomes equal to the flow rate of the opening jet is 213 of the depth of the opening jet below the soffit, regardless the opening geometry; (3)the nondimensional height of the virtual point source of an opening jet plume is only a function of the non-dimensional opening mass flow rate; and (4)the opening jet plume mass flow rates in experiments at two different scales are well correlated in terms of a non-dimensional plume mass flow rate and non-dimensional height, defined using the opening width as the characteristic length.