Citation

Johansson N, Ekholm M. Fire Technol. 2018; 54(1): 97-116.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10694-017-0674-y

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The results from a round-robin study in which practicing fire safety engineers simulated the same scenario are presented in this paper. The simulation task included the simulation of an 800 mm heptane pool in a three-room apartment. The participants, representing eight Swedish consultancy firms, simulated the well-specified scenario with FDS 5. The participants received information about the building, the fire mass loss rate and initial conditions. The task was performed a priori, meaning that the participants were not given any experimental or simulation results prior to performing the task. The study shows that there is a variation between the participants in how the input file was specified, the choice of input data and the types of devices used in FDS. The differences in how the fuel and the burner were described were relatively large, which resulted in large differences in mass loss rate and heat release rate. Furthermore, several of the participants made mistakes when the fire was prescribed and this resulted in a variation in the calculated parameters like the temperature increase, which was 300 K in the fire room and 50 K to 150 K in the adjacent rooms. However, the study shows that when the heat release rate and wall boundary conditions were well defined, good temperature predictions could be made.

Language: en

Keywords

Fire dynamics; Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS); Fire engineering; Round-robin; Simulations