Nonlinear dynamical model of compartment fire flashover (Q718908)

The author presents and discusses a nonlinear dynamical model which accounts for the description of a compartmental fire flashover. A thin layer of fuel is burning at the bottom of the compartment while smoke is filling the top of this compartment. Introducing some hypotheses and drawing some computations from the balance equations which describe the energy conservation, the author ends up with a system of two nonlinear equations which describe the evolutions of the temperatures of the smoke layer (\( \theta \)) and of the solid fuel surface (\(\theta _{s}\)), and are respectively written as \[ \frac{d\theta }{d\tau}=1+a_{1}(\theta ^{4}-1)-a_{2}(\theta -1)+a_{3}\theta ^{3}+a_{4}\theta ^{2} \] and \[ \theta _{s}-1=\sqrt{\frac{\tau }{\pi }} \int_{0}^{1}\frac{Bi_{R}(\theta ^{4}-\theta _{s}^{4})-Bi(\theta _{s}-1)}{ \sqrt{_{1-s}}}\,ds. \] Here, \(Bi\) (resp., \(Bi_{R}\)) denotes the Biot (resp., radiation Biot) number, and \(a_{1}\) \(a_{2}\), \(a_{3}\), \(a_{4}\) and \(\tau \) are physical constants. The main discussion of the paper consists to link this model to the theory of thermal explosion, establishing critical conditions of Semenov type. The author draws some computations which give these critical conditions in terms of the data of the problem. He also uses some numerical simulations quoted from the literature, among which is the paper by \textit{T. L. Graham, G. M. Makhviladze} and \textit{J. P. Roberts} [``On the theory of flashover development'', Fire Safety Journal 25, No. 3, 229--259 (1995; \url{doi:10.1016/0379-7112(95)00049-6})].