Department of Fire Protection Engineering,

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609 USA

 

This talk will present a summary of the recent work performed by WPI and funded by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement under Contract Number E12PC00056.

 

The study explores one example of an oil spill scenario: burning oil in an ice cavity. A new set of parameters to the classical problem of confined pool fires in vessels arises under these unique conditions. The icy walls of the cavity create a significant heat sink causing considerable lateral heat losses. The melting of ice due to the heat from the flame causes the cavity geometry to change. To systematically explore this process, experiments were performed in circular ice cavities of varying diameters at small, intermediate and large scale as shown in Fig. 1. A systematic analysis of the experimental data allows the separation of the burning rate into parts caused by convection, radiation, conduction (laterally and in-depth) and other heat transfer mechanisms towards development of an engineering predictive model. The model predicts mass loss rates and shows reasonable agreement with the experimental results. Limits of the model are discussed.

 

Xiaochuan Shi is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She received her BS degree in Aircraft Power Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Xi’an, China (1998), MS and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from WPI (2008, 2012). Dr. Shi’s current research is related to the disposal/clean up of oil spill in the Arctic environment using in-situ burning (ISB).