IDENTIFICATION OF THE SOLID FUEL AUTOIGNITION CHARACTERISTICS: DIRECT NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF THE PMMA AUTOIGNITION UNDER CONE CALORIMETER CONFIGURATIONS

摘要

Fire propagation on the scale of buildings and cities is a major stake. It is conditioned by the ignition of solid fuels in rooms adjacent to the one where the disaster originally takes place. The ignition is so piloted by the initiation of the combustion reaction of the gaseous mixture stemming from the thermal decomposition of the condensed phase induced by heat transfer. Two types of ignition are defined in the literature: piloted-ignition related to the presence of a hot spot and auto-ignition resulting from the thermal runaway within the gas phase. The auto-ignition plays a major role in the context of fire spread between rooms. However, this process has been very little experimentally studied, because of its complexity, and only theoretical analyses were lead concerning the phenomena which take place during solid fuels auto ignition. The aim of the present study is to characterize auto-ignition regimes according to various solid typologies (regarding to thermal and kinetic behaviour) in order to understand better their processes and their occurrence conditions. Thereby, this fine understanding allows to develop global models of fire spread for a deterministic consideration of the fire hazards at urban scale. The brief and local character of the auto-ignition requires the choice of a complete resolution for flows, transfers and chemistry. Thus, the Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) was selected to capture the phenomena, with the introduction of a fine and non-infinitely fast chemistry of thermal decomposition and combustion. The results show that the ignition time decreases linearly with the density as the mass flux. On the contrary, the ignition surface temperature increase and it leads to two different regimes : the first one correspond to a gas phase ignition while the second is piloted by the solid surface. The formers are describing and confirm those exposed by the literature.