PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT OF NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS FOR GLAZING TEMPERATURES IN A COMPARTMENT FIRE

The elapsed time before any glazed windows or doors crack and then subsequently fall out is an important criterion in the development and growth of a compartment fire. However before the structural integrity of the glazing panel can be assessed, the temperature distribution both across the panel and through the depth of the panel must be accurately known. Results are presented in this paper from a coupled computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer simulation of a fire in a compartment with a large glazed window, comparisons are made with recently obtained experimental data. The results demonstrate reasonable agreement with the experimental data but highlight a number of concerns regarding the modelling of glazed compartments when using accepted radiative gas property models in field model simulations