Smoke filling and entrainment behaviors of fire in a sealed ship engine room

Firefighting by sealing the cabin is often served as a final-taken and efficient means of suppressing ship fire. When a fire occurs in a closed engine room, it could cause the internal pressure increased and the oxygen concentration decreased, which further affects the fire burning processes. The interaction between the combustion processes and the changing environment makes sealed fires even complicated. This study investigates the behaviors of smoke plume entrainment and filling in a sealed ship engine room. Theoretical models regarding the plume entrainment and smoke filling are developed, respectively. A new reverse analysis method by coupling particle swarm optimization (PSO) with the smoke filling model is proposed to determine the unknowns in the plume entrainment model. Based on the experimental data in the literature and the reverse analysis, the explicit smoke filling model of sealed ship engine room is developed. Several previous experimental measurements and numeric simulations are used to validate its prediction ability. The results also suggest that a sealed fire has a higher smoke entrainment level than an open case. The proposed sealed ship engine room fire model can be applied to the engineering safety design of cases with potential sealed fires.