Journals & Articles

The below published journals and articles have been written by some of Sotera’s fire engineering experts.

Fire Safety Journal

Human behaviour during evacuation of primary schools: Investigations on pre-evacuation times, movement on stairways and movement on the horizontal plane.

Children are a vulnerable group in society and less is known about their characteristics during evacuation than that of adults. This may lead to fire safety design of child centric buildings that fail to account for or acknowledge accurately the characteristics of children.

Toward Fire Safe Schools: Analysis of Modelling Speed and Specific Flow of Children During Evacuation Drills

It is without question that a child’s perspective on the world or any event is very different from the perspective of an adult. Considering the variance in physical and cognitive abilities, it is appropriate that children are deemed a vulnerable group in society with respect to fire.

Numerical Simulation of Hydrothermal Liquefaction of Algae in a Lab-scale Coil Reactor

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a coil type hydrothermal liquefaction (HTL) reactor with feedstock of algae has been developed using reaction kinetics reported in the literature. The CFD model is applied to understand the effects of thermal conductivity, heat capacity, molar mass, and viscosity of both the reactants and products on the HTL reactions in terms of residence time and mass fractions, for this coil reactor.

Assessment of the reliability of two-equation URANS models in predicting a precessing flow

A systematic assessment of unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) models in predicting the complex flow through a suddenly expanding axisymmetric chamber is reported. Five types of URANS models assessed in the study comprise the standard k-ϵ model, the modified k-ϵ (1.6) model, the modified k-ϵ (1.3) model, the renormalization group (RNG) k-ϵ model, and the shear stress transport (SST) model. To assess the strengths and limitations of these models in predicting the velocity field of this precessing flow, the numerical results are assessed against available experimental results.

Effect of turbulent Schmidt number on the scalar field simulation of a fluidic precessing jet flow

A preliminary numerical study of the external scalar field of a fluidic precessing jet (FPJ) flow is reported. The unsteady Shear Stress Transport (SST) model, which showed generally good agreement with the measured velocity field of flows within a FPJ nozzle, despite some discrepancies, was adopted to assess the effect of the turbulent Schmidt number, Sct, on the simulated scalar field.

The topology of a precessing flow within a suddenly expanding axisymmetric chamber

A comprehensive study on the flow structure of an ensemble-averaged fluidic precessing jet (FPJ) flow is reported. This study is based on the concepts of critical point theory, previous experimental data, and validated simulation results. The unsteady k–ω shear stress transport (SST) turbulence model was adopted for the simulation, which provided high resolution flow details. The numerical model successfully reproduced the four main flow features of the FPJ flow.

New understanding of mode switching in the fluidic precessing jet flow

We report the first systematic investigation of the phenomenon of “switching” between the two bistable axial jet (AJ) and precessing jet (PJ) flow modes in the fluidic precessing jet (FPJ) nozzle. While geometric configurations have been identified where the fractional time spent in the AJ mode is much less than that in the PJ mode, nevertheless, the phenomenon is undesirable and also remains of fundamental interest.

Numerical simulation of the flow within a fluidic precessing jet nozzle

This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model of a complex, three-dimensional and oscillatory flow generated by an axisymmetric fluidic precessing jet nozzle. ANSYS has been chosen as the platform for the modelling.

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