The numerical simulation of fires concerns an increasingly wide range of applications, among which archaeology. The Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave (France) presents thermal marks on some of its walls. These marks result from prehistorical fires and archaeologists would like to know their characteristics (fire location, mass of fuel, number of fires, etc) to make assumptions about their functions. Being impossible to carry out fires in the cave, combustion simulation is a suitable tool to discuss this question. However, simulating a fire in a confined geometry is still challenging and some inherent difficulties must be overcome. In that respect, we reproduced four experimental fires in a cave-like geometry. Four tepee-like hearths, composed of different initial wood masses (16, 32, 60 and 90 kg), were burnt in an underground quarry. Twenty-seven thermocouples measured the temperature in the cold and hot gas layers, as well as in the ceiling jet area. The measurements in the ceiling jet resulting from the 90 kg fire are successfully compared to the corrected Delichatsios correlations. In addition, the measured mass loss rate is compared to a tailored modeling for tepee hearths. We also propose three strategies to simulate the combustion process of the 90 kg hearth: (i) with a significant refinement in the ceiling jet area (approximately 1,500,000 cells) and the law of the wall, (ii) without refinement but with Newton’s law of cooling and (iii) without refinement but with simplifying assumptions and adjustments. While the first and third approaches provide meaningful results, the second case is found to be inconvenient for compartment fires. Based on experimental data, this study aims to give some keys to perform simulations of compartment fires (in tunnels, buildings, car parks, etc) and numerically approximate the combustion of wood.

火灾的数值模拟涉及越来越广泛的应用，其中包括考古学。Chauvet-Pont d'Arc洞穴（法国）在其某些墙壁上带有热标记。这些标记是史前大火的结果，考古学家想知道它们的特征（火的位置，燃料量，火的数量等）以对其功能进行假设。燃烧模拟不可能在山洞中生火，因此它是讨论这个问题的合适工具。但是，在有限的几何形状中模拟火灾仍然具有挑战性，必须克服一些固有的困难。在这方面，我们以类似洞穴的几何形状复制了四次实验性火灾。在地下采石场中烧制了四个圆锥形炉膛，由不同的初始木块（16、32、60和90千克）组成。二十七个热电偶测量了冷气和热气层以及顶喷区域的温度。成功地将90公斤大火引起的天花板射流中的测量值与校正后的Delichatsios相关性进行了比较。另外，将测得的质量损失率与圆锥形炉膛的定制模型进行比较。我们还提出了三种策略来模拟90 kg炉膛的燃烧过程：（i）在顶喷面积（约1,500,000个单元）和壁的定律上进行了显着改进，（ii）在没有改进的情况下采用牛顿定律进行了模拟。冷却和（iii）没有改进，但简化了假设和调整。尽管第一种和第三种方法提供了有意义的结果，但发现第二种情况对于隔舱着火不方便。根据实验数据，