USE OF COMPUTATIONAL FLUID-DYNAMICS FOR SIMULATING ENCLOSURE FIRES

This paper reports on comparing results on the fire environment predic ted by using the technique of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) (or f ield modelling) on simulating an enclosure fire at the preflashover st age with those results reported experimentally in the literature. The theory behind this is to solve a system of partial differential equati ons 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 field s. The package can be executed in an IBM personal computer at or above 486 level. Experiments reported by Steckler et al. at the National Bu reau of Standards, U.S.A. on a single fire chamber; Nakaya et al. at t he Building Research Institute, Japan on a double room fire chamber; t he corner fire plume by Tran and Janssens; the two-room fire experimen t reported by Hagglund at the National Defence Research Establishment (abbreviation: FOA), Sweden; and in the full-scale burning hall by Ing ason 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.