Publications

A spray-suppression model for turbulent combustion

DesJardin, Paul E.; Tieszen, Sheldon R.; Gritzo, Louis A.

A spray-suppression model that captures the effects of liquid suppressant on a turbulent combusting flow is developed and applied to a turbulent diffusion flame with water spray suppression. The spray submodel is based on a stochastic separated flow approach that accounts for the transport and evaporation of liquid droplets. Flame extinguishment is accounted for by using a perfectly stirred reactor (PSR) submodel of turbulent combustion. PSR pre-calculations of flame extinction times are determined using CHEMKIN and are compared to local turbulent time scales of the flow to determine if local flame extinguishment has occurred. The PSR flame extinguishment and spray submodels are incorporated into Sandia's flow fire simulation code, VULCAN, and cases are run for the water spray suppression studies of McCaffrey for turbulent hydrogen-air jet diffusion flames. Predictions of flame temperature decrease and suppression efficiency are compared to experimental data as a function of water mass loading using three assumed values of drop sizes. The results show that the suppression efficiency is highly dependent on the initial droplet size for a given mass loading. A predicted optimal suppression efficiency was observed for the smallest class of droplets while the larger drops show increasing suppression efficiency with increasing mass loading for the range of mass loadings considered. Qualitative agreement to the experiment of suppression efficiency is encouraging, however quantitative agreement is limited due to the uncertainties in the boundary conditions of the experimental data for the water spray.