Abstract: In this paper, a physical model is built to study the eutectic and progressive melting of salt solution in DSC (Differential Scanning Calorimetry) cells. The finite volume method is utilized to solve the heat transfer problem, and the general implicit source-based enthalpy method is employed to handle the absorbed latent heat during the phase change process. The resulting numerical solution is implicit in nature and although iteration on the time step is needed at each time level, the tridiagonal matrix algorithm can be utilized within the iterations leading to efficient and accurate solutions. The effects of the heating rate and the initial salt concentration on the kinetics of the melting process are examined. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]
Abstract: This work describes the application and the performance of a new radiation model in CFD calculations for the simulation of thermal radiation transfer effects on a fire scenario. A 3D Cartesian coordinates radiative heat transfer procedure based on coupling of the FTn finite volume method (FTnFVM) with the bounded high-order resolution CLAM scheme is developed. The narrow-band based weighted-sum-of-gray-gases (NB-WSGG) model is applied to take account of nongray effects by CO2, H2O and soot. To treat irregular boundaries, the present model used the blocked-off-region procedure. This radiation code is implemented in the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a Computational-Fluid-Dynamics-based fire model, where a the combustion is represented by means of the mixture fraction with a single step chemical reaction model and the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used to model the dissipative processes. Computational results with and without radiation effects are compared against available experimental data and quasi-steady state law correlations of in-rack storage fire, which consists a complex configuration of double tri-wall corrugated paper cartons placed onto a wood pallet. Sensibility analyses of spatial and angular grids demonstrate the improvements due to the FTnFVM and to the CLAM scheme in the configuration studied. Results show that the simulations of the flame height, the gas temperature and the gas velocity are strongly influenced by thermal radiation. Overall, simulations predicted closer profiles to the experimental results only when the nongray-sooting radiation model was incorporated and an over-prediction of the gas temperature and the flame height is found when radiation is neglected. A sensibility analysis has shown that the flame characteristics are strongly affected by the soot yield. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]