A Round Robin of fire modelling for performance‐based design

Abstract

Summary Nine participants, representing eight different Swedish fire consultancy firms participated in a Round Robin study where two different cases were simulated with the Fire Dynamics Simulator. The first case included a large open warehouse where the activation of a sprinkler system was to be studied. In the second case time to critical conditions in a theatre was to be calculated. The participants were given clear instructions on the building layout and heat release rate for the two cases. Still, the results demonstrate a significant variation in time to sprinkler system activation (range of 110 seconds) and available safe escape time (range of 60 seconds), between the participants. It is important to emphasise that some degree of variation is unavoidable, as engineers can model things differently without the modelling solution necessarily being incorrect. Even though it is hard to isolate and specific cause of the variation, some of the variation seen in this study is related to modelling choices that are questionable and consequently problematic for the reliability of the fire safety design.

Past, Present and Future for Enclosure Fire Field Model

“…Modeling these fires requires capturing large-scale atmospheric conditions and flows over large regions as well as the small-scale details of flame fronts. This is driving the development of a number of items: better support for massively parallel computations, 1 The characteristic fire diameter is related to the characteristic fire size via the relation…”

“…Several so-called "Round Robin" studies have been conducted where a number of professionals in research or engineering are asked to use a model to simulate a given experimental setup or an enclosure fire scenario, and their simulation results are compared. Such studies have shown that there can be a considerable discrepancy in the results depending on the user and the user's assumptions made on various input data [1].…”

Smart performance-based design for building fire safety: Prediction of smoke motion via AI

“…In this work, we invited six volunteer participants who have different levels of knowledge and experience from different fire engineering companies or research institutes. Similar round-robin approach and group efforts were adopted in simulating the Dalmarnock Fire Test One [69][70][71], warehouse and theatre [72]. Each participant is asked to evaluate the ASET of two atrium cases, as if it is a normal consultancy task or research project.…”

Archive of Mechanical Engineering

“…The evacuation route is also affected by the conditions of fire development in the surroundings [5,6]. Additional elements are the issues related to fire resistance of building structures and their components [7][8][9]. The design of fire protection systems in underground objects is a complex, multi-stage issue, which creates many problems for designers [10,11].…”