Experimental and numerical simulation of multi-component combustion of typical charring material.

• Multi-component reactants and products are considered to be close to real fires. • Multi-component pyrolysis and combustion model are built up in FireFOAM. • The experimental data of TG-FTIR are coupled directly to combustion. • The predicted results agree well with experimental data of cone calorimetry. The direct combustion of typical charring material, with wood as the main representative, has received extensive attention due to its potential as sustainable source of heat and power generation, and the substantial fraction of fuel load in many building fires. In real fire situations, multi-component condensed phase reactants and gas products are involved in the pyrolysis process and the subsequent combustion process. Interestingly, the numerical simulation of these multi-component reactions is relatively not yet well studied. To address this shortcoming, we consider how the reactants can be dealt with using a three-component parallel reaction mechanism and moisture model embedded into the pyrolysis model, wherein the reaction kinetic parameters are optimized by Shuffled Complex Evolution algorithm. The evolved gas products, measured by the TG-FTIR experiment, can be coupled with the extended EDC multi-component combustion model and soot model using FireFOAM. Most of the thermophysical parameters are measured directly by experiments as the input values of simulation. In this work, the predicted results of mass loss rate and heat release rate are compared with experimental data of cone calorimetry, and the good agreement between them validates the applicability of the current multi-component model. Moreover, the effects of three sub-models (three-component parallel reaction mechanism, multiple evolved gas products and the extended EDC multi-component combustion model) are further analyzed based upon the predicted results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]