A Study on Pressure Loss and Pressure Drop of Confluent Supply Structure in Fire Fighting

Pressure variation is an important issue to multichannel confluent supply structure in fire-fighting. In this paper, an experiment bench of reduced-scale multi-channel confluent supply system and a simulation model verified by experiment are presented. The pressure loss and pressure drop are investigated in different working conditions. It is shown that the total pressure losses increase with the increase of parallel channels and average inlet velocity. The pressure drop caused by synchronous switching between two channels tends to increase with the increase of average inlet velocity. For a certain average velocity, the maximum pressure drop does not occur at the shortest switching time, but the longer the switching time, the smaller the pressure drop. Meanwhile, the flow features can be analyzed with the mean velocity contours in the simulation model. It is concluded that the number of parallel channels, average inlet velocity and switching time are the mostly important operation parameters affecting the pressure loss and pressure drop of the multi-channel confluent supply structure in fire-fighting.