Kingston University London

Centre for Fire & Explosion Studies

Overview

The Centre for Fire and Explosion Studies (CFES) aims to deliver the highest quality research, postgraduate training and consultancy services in fire and explosion modelling as well as environmental flows. The Centre is internationally renowned for its modelling capabilities based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques with a primary focus on large eddy and direct numerical simulations (LES and DNS) and RANS-based CFD for problems involving very large domain.

Our research activities are supported by substantial funding from the European Commission, EPSRC, overseas government scholarship schemes and industrial organisations including major international companies as well as SMEs.

With a clear focus on model development to address the underlying physical and chemical processes, we have established a niche that strikes a fine balance between fundamental research, high quality publications and industrial applications related to fire and explosion safety in the built environment, transport systems, process plants and offshore platforms as well as hydrogen safety in nuclear installations. Building on from this distinctive breadth of model development capability underpinned by fundamental and applied science, we have also developed multidisciplinary research in other strategic areas related to government and industrial priorities on environment protection and sustainable energy. This has resulted in our recent success in developing cutting edge modelling capabilities for the multiphase flow process during pipeline blowdown and decompression as well as heavy gas dispersion. The former has put us in the forefront of research in relation to pipeline transmission in the context of carbon capture and storage (CCS). For heavy gas dispersion, we focus on the physical understanding of the complex multiphase flows resulting from accidental release of liquefied natural gas (LNG), carbon dioxide and other industrial gases.

More recently, we have also started developing modelling capability for wind turbine aerodynamics and adjoint optimization focusing on the environmental impact of acoustic emissions.

For general enquiries contact the Director, Professor Jennifer Wen j.wen@kingston.ac.uk.

Key Areas of Activities

• Fundamental development
• Sub-grid scale models for turbulence, combustion, soot and radiative heat transfer
• High order numerical methods for shock laden flows and shock induced spontaneous ignition
• Multi-phase flow modelling using the homogeneous equilibrium method
• Flame-wall interaction using the coherent flame model extended
• Verification and development of simplified chemistry for turbulent combustion modelling
• Development of adjoint method within the LES frame for airfoil/blade optimisation
• Release and dispersion
• Hydrogen jet releases from high pressure systems or small leaks in relation to vehicle applications
• Multi-phase carbon dioxide during pipeline transmission for CCS applications
• Heavy gas dispersion incorporating the effect of atmospheric boundary layer, obstacles and terrain.
• Dispersion from small carbon dioxide leaks in the CCS chain
• Wind turbine aerodynamics focusing on the environmental impact of acoustic emissions. This work is a spin off from the dispersion modeling and our extensive development in the frame of the open source CFD code OpenFOAM.
• Fire
• Compartment fires
• Pool and jet fires
• Large scale LNG fires
• Flame spread
• Hydrogen jet fires
• Explosion
• Vapour cloud and hydrogen explosions
• Transition to detonation in vapour cloud explosions
• Modelling large scale vapour cloud detonation
• Flame acceleration and deflagration to detonation transition (DDT)
• Prevention, Protection and Mitigation
• Watermist and Micromist for fire suppression and explosion control
• Flame and detonation arrester
• Structure response to fire and blast loading
• The response of glazing systems in fires

Staff

Dr J. Wen
Dembele S. Dr,
Donchev T. Dr,
Muppala S.P.R. Dr,
Omiya Y. Prof (Visiting Professor),
Tam V.H.Y. Dr (Visiting Professor),
Volkov K Dr,

Researchers

Aghajani, Hamed
Badiger, Ramesh
Chen, Zhibin
Heidari, Ali
Jedi, Noushin
Jie, Hongen
Udechukwu, Izunna D
Vendra, Madhav Rao
Wang, Changjian (Dr.)
Wang, Wei (Dr.)
Xu, Baopeng (Dr.)
Yin, Shuo