Smoke flow phenomena and turbulence characteristics of tunnel fires

Gravity currents are similar in behavior with smoke flows. This work aims to provide evidence justifying the use of gravity current approach to model smoke flows downstream of the fire source. The turbulence solver available in almost all commercial CFD codes solves RANS for the flow field. To find out how well the nature of smoke flow be accurately modeled using RANS that is widely used for incompressible flows. The feasibility of using both Reynolds- and Favre-averaging schemes was numerically compared and examined in this paper. In this work, numerical simulations of a fire occurred in a 400-m longitudinally ventilated tunnel have been successfully performed using FDS version 4. Large eddy simulation is employed in this study. Although the ranges of fire size and ventilation velocity vary respectively from 0 MW to 100 MW and 0 m/s to 10 m/s, this paper focuses on the general flow and temperature fields and the turbulence characteristics. Furthermore, the turbulence kinetic energy levels of the flow in the tunnel at several locations were investigated. Since the flow field is generally induced by mechanical ventilation and combustion, the main contribution to the turbulence kinetic energy comes from its longitudinal, vertical, or their combination.