Numerical model of a jet-fire facility for fire resistance passive protection assessments

Jet fires from high pressure leakages represent a severe hazard onpetroleum, petrochemical and gas plants. The high thermal and erosionloads hitting the equipment and products cannot be reproduced withconventional furnaces to evaluate the fire resistance performances.Thus, the jet fire facility according to the ISO 22899-1 standard wasadopted to simulate the impingement of a jet fire. However, due tothe economic constraints to perform such a test, a virtual jet fire wasdeveloped by Efectis to extrapolate several solutions based on just onetest. The aim of this paper is to present the assessment and validationof this numerical facility. The thermal loads for typical external andinternal configurations described in the reference standard are modeledwith the CFD code FDS and compared with experimental results.This allows a further thermal transfer analysis into the tested element,performed with the FEM code SAFIR. The temperature evolutioninto the protection product is then evaluated and extrapolation for theprotection coatings can be investigated.