Does anyone know how to model a fire in FLUENT? I would like to study the effect of a fire on a steel beam. I have gone about his in two ways.

1) I made a solid model of a steel beam and set the surfaces of the beam as walls emitting radiation. There is no mesh around the outside of the beam. Will this work? Will Fluent calculate the conduction of heat in the beam if I set a heat flux?

2) I made a solid beam and put a clyinder around it to represent the fire. I set the face of the cylinder as a wall with radiation. The inside of the cylinder is a fluid of air. Will fluent calculate the conduction in the beam?

in your first approach, if you dont have mesh in a particular region, that region will not be included in your calculations.

in your second approach, as long as you have the interface between air and steel modeled correctly (I guesss interior BC will work) conduction will be solved. But i dont think a cylinder will model fire correctly .. i dont know how the heat flux function works for a fire ... but if you have fire only on one side of the beam, cylinder will not accurately represent it ... plus you need to be worrying about how the radiation shape factor for inside surface of cylinder will affect your solution .. certainly one part of fire has not effect on the other part of fire