Evaluation of Safety Scenarios for Fires in Waste Disposal Facilities through Numerical Simulations

After several high-profile fires in waste and recycling facilities, the industry is put under pressure, especially as the materials processed in waste recycling are getting increasingly dangerous. Fire is an ever-present possibility at most waste management sites requiring proper preventive and mitigative strategies because it can cause significant damage to people, property and the environment. Fire risk assessment may benefit from applying the concept of fire safety engineering and numerical tools to approach the phenomena quantitatively. However, the complexity of such fire scenarios requires a detailed analysis that also involves an insight into fundamental processes, including pyrolysis of solid waste matrices and combustion of pyrolizate. These steps are critical for defining safety features of fire scenarios in waste disposal facilities, but the availability of input data may limit the modelling capability of numerical tools. The present work deals with modelling a fire scenario of a bale of plastics starting from literature data in which both pyrolysis and combustion are addressed. Having an accurate reaction model is of paramount importance in modelling solid waste fires. However, full-scale fire tests in open fields will be required to validate and systematize how piles of material burn dependently on boundary conditions.