学 术 报 告-Burning Behavior of Crude Oil in Ice Cavities

Department of Fire Protection Engineering,

Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA 01609 USA

lydiashi@wpi.edu

This talk will present a summary of the recent work performed by WPI and  funded by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement under Contract  Number E12PC00056.

The study explores one example of an oil spill scenario: burning oil in an  ice cavity. A new set of parameters to the classical problem of confined pool  fires in vessels arises under these unique conditions. The icy walls of the  cavity create a significant heat sink causing considerable lateral heat losses.  The melting of ice due to the heat from the flame causes the cavity geometry to  change. To systematically explore this process, experiments were performed in  circular ice cavities of varying diameters at small, intermediate and large  scale as shown in Fig. 1. A systematic analysis of the experimental data allows  the separation of the burning rate into parts caused by convection, radiation,  conduction (laterally and in-depth) and other heat transfer mechanisms towards  development of an engineering predictive model. The model predicts mass loss  rates and shows reasonable agreement with the experimental results. Limits of  the model are discussed.

Xiaochuan Shi is a post-doctoral fellow in the department of Fire  Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She received  her BS degree in Aircraft Power Engineering from Northwestern Polytechnic  University, Xi’an, China (1998), MS and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from WPI  (2008, 2012). Dr. Shi’s current research is related to the disposal/clean up of  oil spill in the Arctic environment using in-situ burning (ISB).