Combustion simulation has made great strides recently with the successful use of Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to simulate systems where unsteady effects are important. An example where such effects are important is in large pools fires. For example, the puffing nature of the fire is the result of periodic, large-scale air entrainment caused by the formation of small scale Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities at the base of the pool (Tieszen et al. 2004). The nature of the air-entrainment behavior affects the properties of the flow field, including the locations of the reaction zones and the radiative heat transfer to objects in or near the fire. Thus, for accurate prediction of the flow field along with the accompanying features of the flow field, one must capture the unsteady effects in the simulation. In this discussion, we will focus on the use of an LES tool, called ARCHES, to compute heat flux to objects in or near large fires. We employ the Validation and Verification methodology of Oberkampf and coworkers to assess the quality of the various submodels within ARCHES by using experimental data germane to each submodel. We also use experimental data from Greiner and coworkers (University of Reno) and Blanchat and coworkers (Sandia National Labs) to validate hear flux to objects in large transportation pool fires. Utilizing validation metrics, we assess the level of agreement between the ARCHES LES simulation and the experimental measurements.

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