Analysis of the effect of an external fire on the safety operation of a power plant

The basic aim of this paper is to examine the relevant features of an outdoor fire event and its influence on the surrounding area. The work is based on the analytical study of fire origin, its development and spread. The computer program fire dynamic simulator (FDS) is used to simulate fire behaviour. This program uses large Eddie simulation (LES) to calculate fire development and the spread of combustion products in the environment. The fire source is located in the vicinity of a hazardous plant; e.g., power, chemical, etc. The article presents the brief background of the FDS computer program and the initial and boundary conditions used in the mathematical model. In this analysis, it is often necessary to carry out many repeat simulations of a hazardous event and the computer run time becomes an important factor. Ideally, results should be obtained with a dense computational grid but hardware resources and excessive computational time can preclude this option. The response is to reduce a grid density but to ensure that results are only acceptable if comparable to those obtained with a dense grid. The work presents some corrections of the physical model used and its validation by experimental data, which influence the quality of results.