Study of water‐mist behaviour in hot air induced by a room fire: Model development,validation and verification

Water‐mists are emerging as an effective agent for the suppression of fires. However, the mechanisms of suppression are complex and the behaviour of individual water droplets in a smoke layer generated by fires must be quantified. This study investigates the behaviour of individual droplets injected from a nozzle into a hot air environment induced by a room fire. A semi‐empirical model has been developed based on the conservation of mass, momentum and energy to evaluate the heat and mass transfer phenomena in an air‐water droplet system. The model has considered the effect of change of momentum of an evaporating droplet. A forward finite difference approach is applied to solve the governing time dependent ordinary differential equations. The droplets are considered to be ‘lumped mass’ and variable thermo‐physical properties of water and air and the change of Reynolds number of the droplets, due to the change of their diameter and velocity are considered. The effect of high evaporation rate on the mass and heat transfer coefficient and the contribution of radiation emanating by a flame and the surrounding boundary walls are also considered in the model which were not taken into account in the previous studies. Experimental data on terminal velocity and adiabatic saturation temperature are used to validate and verify the model. The validation and verification indicate that the proposed model predicted the terminal velocity within 4% of the experimental data and predicted the saturation temperature within 5% of the adiabatic saturation temperature. This semi‐empirical model is also used as a tool to validate a more comprehensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based tool, Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS). It is found that FDS results agree well with the results of the proposed model. Furthermore, the proposed model can be used to evaluate the temperature, velocity, diameter and other physical properties of a droplet travelling through a layer of hot air. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.