Estimation of Thermal Balance in

ABSTRACT: In order to predict the scale dependency of fire property in oil tank fires, we estimated the thermal balance of generated heat from the fire with a simple fire model, a so-called one mesh model. In this estimation, both ex-perimental values of burning rate and air entrainment in heptane pool fires were used. For 1 m tank fires, it was found that about 70 % of the generated heat was lost as upward convective heat and about 30 % was lost as radiative heat, and only about 1 % was used for fuel vaporization. The ratio of upward convec-tive heat became larger with tank size. Experimental results show that the radiative fraction went down in fires larger than 1 m diameter because of the huge smoke emission. KEY WORDS: Pool fire, one-mesh model, self-absorption coefficient, time-averaged temperature