On Heat Load for Engineering Purpose Related to Process Industry

Comparison between different standards on recommended heat loads from flames show great variation. In general, heat loads from flames do vary in space and are dependent on fuel and surrounding conditions. Recommended heat load in standards should be a characteristic heat representing the average exposure of an object. It is difficult to identify a characteristic heat load by measuring heat flux in local points of a flame. This article presents an approach for identification of average heat load from flame suitable for engineering purpose. The principle is to compare effects on a specimen by a known heat load, with the effect of an object exposed to a real flame. The article describes the experimental equipment together with some experimental results. To compare experiments with real flame exposure, the simulation software packages VessFire and Brilliant, are used. First the simulation software has been validated against the experiments documented in this paper. Then the software has been used to reproduce the effects on a specimen exposed to a real flame. This article further presents simulation results from both experiments and real flame exposure. The results of the simulations are in agreements with the experiments and give a good tool for identifying relevant heat loads. The real flame experiment is a test of a pipe according to the standard jet flame procedure described in [9]. The heat load from the real flame is shown to give the same influence to the exposed object as a constant uniform heat load of 180 kW/m².