Review of Modeling Fire Suppression by Water Sprays by Computational Fluid Dynamics

Water-based fire control systems such as sprinkler are widely used in providing safety. In addition to following the prescriptive codes without understanding the physics behind, more quantitative approaches such as numerical modeling for evaluating the system performance were carried out for new designs. Note that performance-based fire codes might be necessary for some applications. Numerical modeling also contributes to the understanding of the fire extinguishment mechanisms. One of the popular models is Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). However, in comparing with applications to simulate fire growth, spread and smoke movement, CFD has not yet been applied extensively to study the fire suppression process or used as a practical design tool. This paper is to review the current developments in using CFD for simulating fire suppression with water sprays. The aim is to provide a broader view on how CFD can be applied for such a study. Fundamental theories for fire field models will be presented in this paper first. Turbulence, combustion, radiation and chemistry models in application to fire modeling are discussed. More advanced but less applied CFD techniques such as Large Eddy Simulations (LES) will be briefly introduced. Also, water spray models available in the literature are discussed in detail. Two different droplet tracking methods − EulerianLagrangian method and Eulerian-Eulerian method are reviewed. Key issues of fire extinguishment criteria for different scenarios are analyzed. Moreover, CFD modeling of suppressing solid fuels by water sprays, current trends and potential applications of CFD in fire suppression modeling are highlighted. Finally, needs for an extensive study on model development and validation studies are pointed out.