Computer Museum, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of Greenwich

Computer equipment, once viewed as leading edge, is quickly condemned as obsolete and banished to basement store rooms or rubbish bins. The magpie instincts of some of the academics and technicians at the University of Greenwich, London, preserved some such relics in cluttered offices and garages to the dismay of colleagues and partners. When the University moved into its new campus in the historic buildings of the Old Royal Naval College in the center of Greenwich, corridor space in King William Court provided an opportunity to display some of this equipment so that students could see these objects and gain a more vivid appreciation of their subject's history.

Predicting toxic species concentrations in a full-scale vitiated fire

A toxicity model on dividing the computational domain into two parts, a control region (CR) and a transport region (TR), for species calculation was recently developed. The model can be incorporated with either the heat source approach or the eddy dissipation model (EDM). The work described in this paper is a further application of the toxicity model with modifications of the EDM for vitiated fires. In the modified EDM, chemical reaction only occurs within the CR. This is consistent with the approach used in the species concentration calculations within the toxicity model in which yields of combustion products only change within the CR. A vitiated large room-corridor fire, in which the carbon monoxide (CM) concentrations are very high and the temperatures are relatively low at locations distant from the original fire source, is simulated using the modified EDM coupled with the toxicity model. Compared with the EDM, the modified EDM provide significant improvements in the predictions of temperatures at remote locations. Predictions of species concentrations at various locations follow the measured trends. Good agreements between the measured and predicted species concentrations are obtained at the vitiated fire stage.

On the modelling of fire atmosphere/sprinkler spray interacting using an Euler-Lagrange framework

An Euler-Lagrange particle tracking model, developed for simulating fire atmosphere/sprinkler spray interactions, is described. Full details of the model along with the approximations made and restrictions applying are presented. Errors commonly found in previous formulations of the source terms used in this two-phase approach are described and corrected. In order to demonstrate the capabilities of the model it is applied to the simulation of a fire in a long corridor containing a sprinkler. The simulation presented is three-dimensional and transient and considers mass, momentum and energy transfer between the gaseous atmosphere and injected liquid droplets.