Development and Evaluation of Two New Droplet Evaporation Schemes for Fire Dynamics Simulations

Published

May 15, 2017

Author(s)

Randall J. McDermott, Jason Floyd

Abstract

The evaporation of sprinkler droplets is an important phenomena in fire simulations both for heat removal from the gas and for heat removal from surfaces. In this paper, we address the problems of potential numerical instability and super-saturation that may occur in explicit time integration of the droplet equations. Two novel numerical approaches are developed and evaluated. The first is based on an analytical solution that relaxes the cell composition and temperature toward the equilibrium values. The second method is an implicit solution to the droplet equations. The two approaches are implemented in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and verified and validated using both single droplet and practical sprinkler calculations. Ultimately, the implicit approach is demed the most cost effective for practical fire simulations.

Conference Dates

June 12-16, 2017

Conference Location

Lund, SE

Conference Title

International Symposium on Fire Safety Science

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.04.036

Local Download

Keywords

FDS, droplet evaporation, sprinklers, watermist

Citation

McDermott, R. and Floyd, J. (2017), Development and Evaluation of Two New Droplet Evaporation Schemes for Fire Dynamics Simulations, International Symposium on Fire Safety Science, Lund, SE, [online], https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2017.04.036, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=922794 (Accessed October 20, 2025)