Phenomenological characteristics and flame radiation of dynamically evolving oil spill fires in a sealed ship engine room

Available references on ship engine room fires are mainly based on the pool fires, while in reality the leaked liquid fuel tends to form dynamically evolving spill fires, which are quite dangerous and scarcely investigated. In this paper, one-dimensional spill fire experiments with different leakage rates are tentatively conducted in a model-scale ship engine room to reveal their hazards. Due to the coupling effects of oxygen confinement and thermal radiation enhancement, the development of the spill fire for higher fuel leakage rate can be divided into continuous spreading, deceleration diffusion, quasi-steady burning, and decay stages, while the quasi-steady burning stage is nonexistent at lower leakage rates. The initial spread rate of the spill fire in the ship engine room is lower than that in open space, which may be attributed to the heat feedback enhancement in the ship engine room. The spread rate in the continuous spreading stage is about 2.3 times that in the deceleration diffusion stage. Using the modified solid flame model, a segmented theoretical model is developed to predict the radiative heat flux of the spill fire in the ship engine room, and the predicted results agree well with the measured results, with an error ranging from 9% to 19%.