Study on the mass loss rate of liquid pool fire in a well-confined ship cabin

Liquid pool fires in a well-confined ship cabin are experimentally studied. The experimental results showed that the fuel consumption ratio remains stable in the oxygen-lean mode in the well-confined environment for both the tested fuels (i.e., n-heptane and diesel) in this study. The n-heptane pool fire exhibited five burning stages (i.e., initial growth, stabilized burning, transition, boiling, and decaying), while the diesel only showed three stages (i.e., initial growth, stabilized burning, and decaying). Boiling combustion behaviors were not observed when the pool diameter is bigger than 30 cm, but an unusual phenomenon of ghost fire appeared in the later burning stage. Under the oxygen-lean mode, the fuel consumption ratio of n-heptane is 0.19–0.26; and it is about 0.28 for diesel. In the well-confined space, the average mass loss rate per unit area did not change too much under various pool sizes. The average mass loss rate of the n-heptane was observed greater than that of diesel. Besides this, a theoretical model was developed to predict the mass loss rate of liquid fires in a well-confined space, where the predictions agree reasonably well with the experimental data, showing an average discrepancy of less than 10%.