In oil spill–fire accidents, the spread of burning fuel from petroleum product containers may increase accident losses and trigger further accidents. Studying the spreading process of spill fires is important to prevent accidents and mitigate losses. Herein, a spill-fire spread model was proposed to predict the spread rate and time varying burning area of liquid fuel spill fires. The model was developed using one-dimensional nonlinear shallow water equations. Fuel consumption was used as the source term in the equations. To ensure numerical stability and accuracy, the third-order TVD Runge–Kutta method and the second-order MUSCL scheme were used for time advancement and numerical space reconstruction, respectively. Numerical flux was calculated by using the HLL approximate Riemann solver. The algorithm of the shallow water equations was modified in accordance with the spread characteristics of spill fires. Using the developed spread model, the dynamic burning area and dynamic fuel thickness of a spill fire were calculated. The simulation results were verified using the experimental results on continuously released n-heptane spill fires, and the two results were in good agreement.

在溢油火灾事故中，石油产品容器中燃烧的燃料蔓延可能会增加事故损失并引发进一步的事故。研究泄漏火灾的蔓延过程对于预防事故、减轻损失具有重要意义。在此，提出了泄漏火灾蔓延模型来预测液体燃料泄漏火灾的蔓延速率和随时间变化的燃烧面积。该模型是使用一维非线性浅水方程开发的。燃料消耗被用作方程中的源项。为了保证数值稳定性和精度，分别采用三阶TVD Runge-Kutta方法和二阶MUSCL格式进行时间推进和数值空间重构。使用 HLL 近似黎曼求解器计算数值通量。根据溢油火灾的蔓延特点，对浅水方程的算法进行了修改。使用开发的蔓延模型，计算了泄漏火灾的动态燃烧面积和动态燃料厚度。利用连续释放正庚烷泄漏火灾的实验结果对模拟结果进行了验证，两者结果吻合较好。