CALCULATION OF THE EFFECTS OF A CARGO FIRE IN A HOLD OF A SHIP

To better understand shipboard fire environments, a combined experimental and computational study bas been conducted at Sandia National Laboratories to define problems that could develop and to demonstrate that modem computational ftuid dynamics (CFD) tools can adequately model fires in enclosed volumes (e.g., the holds of ships). A simulated shipping cask was used as a test object (calorimeter) in this study. Fuel and wood fire experiments were staged by the Coast Guard in Hold 4 of the Mayo Lykes, a 10,700 deadweight too, World War ll, Liberty Class, freighter located in Mobile Bay, Alabama, USA in 1995. During these tests, temperatures and heating rates were measured in Holds 4 and 5. This paper describes the development of a computational model for a wood crib fire located in the same hold as the test object. The commercially available CFD code used was CFX, developed by Harwell Laboratory, United Kingdom. This finite volume code was selected because of its previous use in fire analyses and its ability to treat all beattransfer mechanisms (i.e., conduction, convection, and thermal radiation) in a coupled manner. Comparisons are made between experimental measurements and blind computational results, i.e., no experimental data were used to make the computations.