In real world, it is never acceptable to set fire inside iconic and large commercial buildings or facilities. But if you are working at Mechartés, you will come across buildings & facilities that are set on fire routinely to simulate real and potential fire scenarios on computers to assess their impact and methods of controlling these fires.
The destruction caused by fire in urban establishments is known to human civilization since the time in antiquity when Rome burned for six days continuously. But in modern times, fire engineering practices have reduced causalities & infrastructure damage exponentially. Today, the scope of fire safety is not only limited to extinguishing fire but covers wide variety of disciplines like early fire detection, smoke management, provision for escape facilities; even during building space & layout planning and last but definitely not least, proactive use of dynamic fire modeling to assess risks to life and property and to develop effective fire protection & evacuation strategies for scenarios that cannot be predicted by conventional wisdom.
Even with modern engineering and safety practices, the threat of accidental fire cannot be negated in modern building and industrial infrastructures. This threat brings the necessity of fire modeling to the forefront of large building and industrial facility design & development. With advances made in computer hardware performance and numerical algorithms, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software are routinely used by engineers to come up with ingenious & effective solutions to minimize damage to life and property.
Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is one such CFD software actively developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to simulate fire driven fluid flow in situations of varying complexities. The hydrodynamic model, combustion model, thermal radiation model, sprinkler model etc, that are incorporated in FDS are continuously verified and validated by the active community of academic, scientific and professional interest group. This community effort has developed FDS into a robust and reliable software to model and simulate fire & smoke propagation inside buildings and facilities. Apart from dynamic fire modeling, numerical simulation methods are also actively used to simulate evacuation and predict indoor air quality inside buildings. Modern evacuation modeling software have reached the capability to incorporate psychological responses of human beings to fire inside enclosed spaces. With software like CONTAM, important information about exposure of occupants to airborne contaminants can be modeled and simulated for eventual risk assessment.
Modern design practices for fire safety are increasingly adopting numerical simulations to study the behavior of a fire protection system without building it. The results are accurate in general, compared to analytical model, especially when applied in complex situations. These simulations are also helping fire engineers to find unexpected phenomenon, behavior of the system and easily perform “What-If” analyses. Mechartés has been enabling our customers to address the following design & safety concerns:
- What locations inside a building can be described as the “worst” location for a fire incident?
- What is the minimum response time required during evacuation in a given “worst” condition?
- With the proposed fire safety & evacuation methodology, what changes can reduce loss of life and property?
- What is the effectiveness of smoke extraction fans and equipments?
Finally, do take out 5 minutes to view our presentation on how fire simulation services can be used to engineer your buildings and facilities for fire safety.
Simulation Experts 