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Author
McGrattan, K. B. | Rehm, R. G. | Baum, H. R.
Title
Fire-Driven Flows in Enclosures.
Coporate
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Journal
Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 110, No. 2, 285-291, February 1994
Keywords
enclosures | equations | viscosity | thermal conductivity | vorticity | backdraft | gravity current
Identifiers
hydrodynamic model; Alternating Direction Implicit (ADI); time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations in the Boussinesq approximation
Abstract
A two-dimensional Boussinesq model describing heat-driven, buoyant convection in a polygonal enclosure is presented. The hydrodynamic model is based on the time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations with constant viscosity and thermal conductivity; no turbulence model or other empirical parameters are introduced. The polygonal domain is mapped via a numerical Schwarz-Christoffel transformation onto a rectangle, where the equations of motion are written in terms of the vorticity and stream function. An alternating direction implicit (ADI) difference scheme, second-order in space and first-order in time, is used to integrate the evolution equations, and a standard elliptic solver is used to solve the Poisson equation for the stream function. Computational results which are of interest to the fire research community are presented.