USE OF COMPUTATIONAL FLUID-DYNAMICS FOR SIMULATING ENCLOSURE FIRES

This paper reports on comparing results on the fire environment predicted by using the technique of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) (or field modelling) on simulating an enclosure fire at the preflashover stage with those results reported experimentally in the literature. The theory behind this is to solve a system of partial differential equations describing conservation of mass, momentum and heat with the kappa-epsilon turbulence model. The computer program PHOENICS is used as the simulation tool. By specifying the geometrical configurations of the enclosure and the location, size and thermal power of the fire source, it is possible to predict the fire-induced flow and temperature fields. The package can be executed in an IBM personal computer at or above 486 level. Experiments reported by Steckler et al. at the National Bureau of Standards, U.S.A. on a single fire chamber; Nakaya et al. at the Building Research Institute, Japan on a double room fire chamber; the corner fire plume by Tran and Janssens; the two-room fire experiment reported by Hagglund at the National Defence Research Establishment (abbreviation: FOA), Sweden; and in the full-scale burning hall by Ingason and Olsson at the Swedish National Testing and Research Institute (abbreviation: SP), Sweden are considered. Some of the results on the temperature and interface height of the smoke layer are compared with the popular fire zone model CFAST.