THERMAL SCIENCE
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ESTIMATION OF COMBUSTION EFFICIENCY FOR CEILING VENTED COMPARTMENT FIRES USING ZONE MODEL CONCEPT
ABSTRACT
Combustion efficiency is difficult to measure or estimate for ceiling vented compartment fires because of the comprehensive interaction between vent flows and burning environment. Special phenomenons suggesting very poor burnings were observed in such limited ceiling vented compartment fires, like ghosting flames and oscillating flames. An estimation method for the combustion efficiencies of pool fires, which was important to characterize the incompleteness of the combustion, was established in the scope of zone models, and was validated using a sealed compartment fire case. In this method, oxygen concentrations, fuel mass loss rates can be also predicted based on temperature predictions. Small scale ceiling vented compartment pool fires were studied using this method. Temperature distributions, fuel mass loss rates and oxygen concentrations were compared in order to partially validate the mathematical model. The ventilation conditions of the poor fire were considered and quantified by introducing equivalence ratio. The present study may provide a practical way to understand the incomplete burning of such ceiling vented compartment fires.
KEYWORDS
PAPER SUBMITTED: 2017-04-23
PAPER REVISED: 2017-07-17
PAPER ACCEPTED: 2017-08-11
PUBLISHED ONLINE: 2017-09-09
DOI REFERENCE: https://doi.org/10.2298/TSCI170423187Y
CITATION EXPORT: view in browser or download as text file
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© 2026 Society of Thermal Engineers of Serbia. Published by the VinĨa Institute of Nuclear Sciences, National Institute of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International licence


