A Concept for Assisting Remote IR Damage Assessment by Coupling Numerical Fire Suppression Models with Thermal Signature Models

Abstract

Program Managers (PMs) under the Program Executive Office for Ground Combat Systems (PEO-GCS), funded the U.S. Army CECOM RD&E Center (CERDEC) to develop and apply a 3D numerical model to predict the performance of automatic fire suppression systems in armored combat vehicles with Halon and Halon alternative fire suppressants. Running the model without suppression allows predictions of fuel spray fire propagation in defeated vehicles and the resulting internal temperatures. The model also predicts the extinction of the fire due to oxygen availability. Hence, transient heat flux to interior surfaces can be predicted until fire extinction and can subsequently used as boundary conditions for a thermal signature code such as PRIZM or MUSES. A numerical fireball model specially formulated for fire suppression is incorporated into a 3D, transient, hybrid, finite-volume, finite element code with transient tracking of JP8 and fire suppressant particles. The numerical fireball model consists of a flame front submodel driven by finite-rate kinetics that describe the reactions between sprayed JP8 fuel particles, oxygen and suppressant particles. The purpose of the numerical fireball model is to predict fires resulting from fuel tank or pressurized fuel line penetrations. This information is reported in order to propose the use of the PEO-GCS Fire Suppression Model as input to thermal signature prediction models. The proposed result of this concept would be to gain the ability to predict thermal signatures of defeated enemy armored vehicles for comparison with thermal images from remote IR sensors for damage assessment purposes. This concept would be most valuable when major exterior structural damage (turret separation, etc.) is not present as evidence for damage assessment purposes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADP023084

Entities

People

  • Judy Cooper
  • Neal E. Blackwell
  • Steve J. Mccormick

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Armored Vehicles
  • Boltzmann Equation
  • Combat Vehicles
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Damage Assessment
  • Detection
  • Engineering
  • Equations
  • Equations Of State
  • Fire Suppression
  • Flow
  • Fluid Flow
  • Ground Vehicles
  • Heat Transfer
  • Infrared Detectors
  • Light Armored Vehicles

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Fire Suppression Systems Design.