Abstract: Fire is a typical thermal runaway process of uncontrolled energy release. The possible ignition of adjacent leaked fuel might induce multiple fires burning simultaneously. Improving the security of energy storage and management is thus a great concern to us. A series of numerical simulations have been conducted to study the flame merging behavior and air entrainment restriction effect from square propane fire arrays. The simulation results were first systematically compared to experimental data, showing that the flame characteristics including the flame height, flame centerline temperature, and velocity distributions can be successfully reproduced numerically. Then, the flame merging phenomenon was studied by varying fire spacing, the number of fires, and the heat release rate of an individual fire in the array. Results show that the critical flame merging spacing of the fire array equals to 0.4 times the flame height of a single fire, which is independent of the fire array size. More importantly, a parameter denoting the extent of air entrainment restriction.

Biography: Dr. Jie Ji is one Full Professor and Vice director at the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He obtained his Ph.D. degree in USTC in 2008 and was promoted to full professor in 2015. He serves as editorial board member of Fire Safety Journal (the official journal of IAFSS) and Fire Technology (the official journal of NFPA and SFPE). He has published over 80 SCI papers being as the first or corresponding author and two books. He has presided the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China and several projects supported by National Key Research and Development Plan, etc.