Citation

Huber ML, Yang JC. Fire Safety J. 2002; 37(5): 517-524.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

As a prerequisite to a comprehensive analysis of aircraft fuel tank fire and explosion hazards, a vapor-liquid equilibrium thermodynamic analysis was developed to assess the fuel vapor behavior in an aircraft fuel tank ullage. The analysis was based on the Peng-Robinson equation of state and the extended corresponding-states method. Jet-A fuel was treated as a pseudo-single-component fluid and as a binary mixture. The calculated fuel/air mass ratios from the binary-mixture model followed the trend observed in previous measurements more closely than those from the pseudo-single-component model. The calculated results also demonstrated that for a given amount of fuel, increasing the tank temperature could potentially cause an initially non-flammable fuel/air vapor in the ullage to become flammable.