Abstract:Fires are complex and it is hard to derive relationships from theory in fire science. Full-scale and small-scale experiments have been used with great success in order to increase the understanding of fire chemistry and fire dynamics. An alternative or complement to these often expensive and resource demanding traditional experiments are numerical experiments. In this paper, numerical experiments are reviewed as a research method and put into the context of traditional compartment fire experiments. Benefits an… Show more
“…1. The method is based on a numerical experiment, a research method that Johansson [15] has elaborated on. The numerical experiment included approximately 90 FDS simulations with different room configurations and heat release rates.…”
Section: Methods 1 -Empirical Modelsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Example of approximate expanded uncertainties in heat release measurement conducted in different previously published experimental test series (the table has been obtained from[31]). …”
“…1. The method is based on a numerical experiment, a research method that Johansson [15] has elaborated on. The numerical experiment included approximately 90 FDS simulations with different room configurations and heat release rates.…”
Section: Methods 1 -Empirical Modelsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Example of approximate expanded uncertainties in heat release measurement conducted in different previously published experimental test series (the table has been obtained from[31]). …”
“…This is important because, while the performance of such models for some circumstances has been validated by laboratory tests, they are notoriously dependent on user‐competency. Thus Johansson () notes, “the user has been found to be the most critical link in the chain of simulations.” Likewise, with finite element modeling of structural responses to fire, there is concern that model users may be unaware of the limits of their competence:Someone who is trained classically as a structural engineer, who's then told to run a finite element model on a building under fire, who doesn't know anything about fire dynamics or heat transfer or thermal deformations or how materials soften, they're just going to take the input data that they're given, they're going to run the analysis, looks reasonable, fine. They don't know that they should be thinking harder about this stuff, they're not competent to know where their competence ends …”
Section: Pbd In Operation: Demonstrating Performancementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Models are typically validated against experiments (themselves “models” of actual building fires); therefore care must be taken in claiming that this validation extends to more complex “real world” scenarios. As Johansson observes: “Compartment fire dynamics are complex and can only be described analytically with simplified theories due to the random behaviour of fires and flames” (, p. 1). The representativeness of other types of fire safety models, such as evacuation models, is even less well understood because “few validation studies have been performed, mainly because of the lack of real world data available” (Ronchi & Nilsson , p. 17).…”
Section: Pbd In Operation: Demonstrating Performancementioning
Fire safety has traditionally been regulated by prescriptive rules that stipulate requirements according to the type and size of a building, with the regulator's job being to check that these rules have been followed. However, many jurisdictions now allow performance-based design regulation in which approval depends on the regulator assessing the prospective performance of a bespoke fire safety design for a particular project. Regulators thus need to be able to adjudicate on the knowledge claims put forward by fire safety engineers, but most regulators lack the knowledge to interrogate claims that are often the product of complex mathematical modeling across a range of disciplines. This expertise asymmetry poses a challenge for the effective regulation of fire safety designs, and the relative immaturity of fire safety engineering as a profession needs to be addressed before it would be wise to rely on professional competence and ethics alone to ensure safety. distances to exits, enclosed stairways, sprinklers, etc.), the new approach instead requires engineers to demonstrate performance outcomes for a project, and is thus typically referred to as Performance-Based Design (PBD). Regulatory approval is based on scrutiny of the design plans; in the case of prescriptive regulation, the regulator can check that all features necessary for that type of building have been appropriately incorporated, but in the case of PBD the regulator must be able to understand the knowledge claims made by the designer in order to judge whether their design provides adequate fire safety.Supporters of PBD fire engineering argue that it enables rational analysis to replace adherence to outdated and sometimes illogical rules that constrain innovation and add unnecessary costs. However, PBD has also been critiqued by those who see it as part of a neoliberal move toward deregulation. In particular, there is concern that PBD shifts governance of risk from the public to the private sphere if decisions about acceptable levels of safety become a matter of engineers' design choices rather than being societally mandated in requirements set by government (Brannigan 1999).The issue addressed here is a specific aspect of this critique, and centers on the challenge of expertise asymmetry posed by PBD regulation. The argument is that expertise asymmetry occurs when regulators have less relevant expertise than those they regulate, and that this may impair the effectiveness of regulation (Spinardi 2016). In the case of fire safety, the shift from prescriptive regulation to PBD raises concerns over the extent to which those who approve building designs have sufficient expertise to provide competent oversight of the proposed solutions.
“…Furthermore, they used the FDS modeling outputs to supplement the data collection, including volume flows and air pressures, that were not measured during the experiment. In addition, FDS for numerical experiments play an important role for research in fire science 13 while enabling seamless information exchange with BIM software through common file formats such as DWG and IFC files. Sun and Turkan, 14 for example, integrated BIM with FDS to simulate fire spread in a single‐story wooden building to investigate the impact of current fire safety management practices including indoor fire hazard prediction and occupant evacuation planning.…”
Construction fires are a big threat to worker safety and property safety. Mass timber buildings under construction are largely unprotected as they are not yet equipped with active fire protection systems. With the addition of Types IVA, B, and C, the 2021 International Building Code adopted stricter requirements for mass timber buildings that are under construction. Cross‐laminated timber (CLT) is used as the primary structural element for high‐rise mass timber buildings. However, to date, limited number of research studies investigated the impact of passive fire protection for CLT buildings that are under construction. To facilitate a better understanding of construction fires and their consequences, it is necessary to develop a numerical modeling solution for the early phases of a CLT construction project, which can be achieved by using building information models together with fire dynamics simulation (FDS). However, the numerical modeling technique must be benchmarked against experimental data first to then extrapolate the modeling technique to explore other parameters and conduct FDS analysis. Therefore, this paper develops and benchmarks a numerical modeling solution against a mid‐scale CLT compartment fire test by applying the FDS tool to simulate the fire behavior within the CLT compartment. The FDS analysis results are expected to validate the practicality of simulating the fire behavior in CLT structures using the numerical model proposed in this study. The overarching goal of this study is therefore to develop a comprehensive numerical modeling solution to simulate and assess passive fire protection sequencing in CLT buildings that are under construction.
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