SELECTION OF DIFFERENCING SCHEMES ON SIMULATING THE SPRINKLER HOT-AIR LAYER PROBLEM

A mathematical model studying the interaction between the hot-air layer induced by a fire with a sprinkler water spray was developed. A technique on computational fluid dynamics was applied to study the airflow part. Earlier studies have indicated that the iteration PISO scheme is a suitable candidate for solving the velocity-pressure linked equation for this sprinkler problem. Four finite differencing schemes including the upwind scheme, the hybrid scheme, the power law scheme, and the QUICK scheme were evaluated in this paper. Numerical experiments were performed at the Swedish National Testing and Research Institute Fire Laboratory test rooms with measured data on physical variables. It is found that the QUICK scheme did not give good results in solving this problem.