Wall and Corner Effects on Fire Plumes as a Function of Offset Distance

A series of compartment fire experiments is described in which a square natural gas burner was positioned in a corner or against a wall and gradually moved towards the room center to assess the relative effects on the plume and compartment temperatures. The experiments were conducted to validate computational fluid dynamics simulations that were performed to provide guidance for probabilistic risk assessments in nuclear power plants. The measurements consist of one dimensional vertical thermocouple arrays to measure the hot gas layer temperature and height, and a three dimensional thermocouple array to measure the temperature of the fire plume as the burner is moved away from the corner or wall. As a result of the modeling and experiments, recommendations have been made that quantify wall and corner effects as a function of offset distance.