An experimental study on the effect of ventilation velocity on burning rate in tunnel fires—heptane pool fire case

Abstract The 1/20 reduced-scale experiments using Froude scaling are conducted to investigate the effect of longitudinal ventilation velocity on the burning rate in tunnel fires. The n-heptane pool fires with heat release rate ranging from 3.71 to 15.6 kW are used in this study. A load cell is used to measure the mass loss rate of burning fuel and the temperature distributions are measured by K-type thermocouples in order to investigate smoke movement. The ventilation velocity in the reduced-scale tunnel is controlled by the wind tunnel through an inverter. The increases in ventilation velocity lead to enhance burning rate of n-heptane fuel. The reason is that the oxygen supply effect prevails rather than the cooling effect as the ventilation velocity increases. As a result, the heat release rates in experiment are larger than constant heat release rates by 4.45–11.3 times in the n-heptane pool fires. Also, it is found that non-dimensional critical ventilation velocity is proportional to one-third power of non-dimensional heat release rate.