In fire safety, passive systems act by limiting the growth of the fire, confining the fire within a compartment and improving the structural resistance to fire. In some aspects, the classification of systems into passive and active solution also reassembles the segregation used for explosion and detonation prevention and suppression. This simple classification of fire safety systems is the base of most of the fire safety regulations, not only in the process industry but also in the whole of civil engineering. Fire protection was declared an “underpinning of good process safety” by and was separated into two distinct branches: passive and active systems. This study shows the viability of the simplified approach in modelling the retention process, and indicates additional benefits of the numerical analyses in the determination of the fire safety of protected premises.įire protection systems help mitigate the effects of a fire in industrial facilities. However, the obtained results had sufficient accuracy (in most cases relative error <10%). Modelling of mixtures with a density close to the density of ambient air has proven to be a challenge. Modelling the retention of the standard IG55 mixture was very close to the experiment. This hypothesis was tested through performing CFD simulations, and their comparison against experimental measurements in a bench scale in a small compartment (0.72 m 3), for six mixtures that differ in their density. As the flow field after discharge is stable and driven mainly by the hydrostatic pressure difference, buoyancy and diffusion, this simplified approach appears as an efficient and cost-effective approach. This paper presents a simplified approach to CFD modelling, by the omission of the discharge phase of the gas system. Standard design methods do not provide sufficient tools for optimisation of the retention process, thus the necessity for development and validation of new tools and methods-such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations.

Among them, gaseous extinguishing systems provide quick, clean suppression and prolonged protection due to long retention process of the gas. Active fire protection systems are critical elements of good process safety.

Pressure cleaner simulator