An experimental and non-dimensional study on the vertical temperature distribution of a sealed ship engine room fire

Fire in a sealed ship engine room is different from open fires, while its suppression is critically important to the ship emergency rescue and related structure safety. This study focused on the vertical distribution of temperature rise in a sealed engine room fire. A series of experiments were carried out to investigate fire behaviors in a reduced-scale sealed ship engine room model with a dimension of 3 m (length) × 3 m (width) × 3.5 m (height). The results suggest that the smoke temperature along the height is not identical with a significant gradient along the ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT2height, which show a similar or even a little lower temperature gradient than those of open fires. The experimental results demonstrated that the time to reach the maximum temperature is different for smoke layers at various heights, while a lower height shows a relatively long delay time. The gradient of temperature rise was found increasing with pool diameter that the gradient of temperature rise of a 30 cm pool fire is about 9 times of that of a 10 cm pool fire. Furthermore, an empirical model was developed to predict the vertical temperature rise distribution along the height at the time of maximum temperature for the sealed engine room fires