Experimental Study on Elevated Methanol Pool Fires in a Compartment

The present paper reports an experimental investigation to explore the effect of fuel pan elevation on fire scenario due to methanol pool fires in a fixed ventilated compartment of size 4 m (height) × 4 m (length) × 4 m (width) having a door opening of 2 m (H_d) × 1 m (W). A reasonably large pool size of diameter 0.8 m is used in experiments so that the results are useful for actual plant fire hazard analysis (FHA) in future. The combustion characteristic of methanol is investigated in 1/32 ratio of fuel surface area to compartment floor area. Fuel pan was kept far toward rear wall center with initial fuel depth of 0.045 m and lip height of 0.055 m, respectively, instead of center (conventionally popular). The three fire source heights ‘h’ for a circular pool fire experiments are 0.3, 0.6, and 0.9 m from the floor. Various parameters like heat release rate (HRR), flame centerline temperature, hot gas temperature, and heat flux are measured. It is noted that no one case flame is impinged to hot gas region. The difference between hot gas layer temperature and upper heat flux is found to be higher in Exp. 3 as comparison of other two experiments (Exp. 1 and Exp. 2). The HRR is also found to be higher for Exp. 3 due to availability of less height between hot region and fire source, which resulted in more evaporation of fuel.