On the Reliability of a Numerical Travelling Fire Model

Abstract

The ongoing urbanization of our society is leading to the situation that many people live, work and gather in buildings of larger size. Open space office buildings are becoming more common, airport terminals are continuously increased in size and new larger railway stations are being built. When it comes to compartments with larger floor areas, the fire may be localized, which means that the fire does not extend on the whole floor. Yet, even when the fire load is distributed, such as in open space office buildings, the area where combustion is raging moves during the fire leading to so‐called “travelling fires”. The classical view of compartment fire with the strong assumption of uniform temperature in the compartment has been challenged, several travelling fire models have been proposed to address the phenomenon. Validation of these models is still scarce. This work is about the assessment of reliability and accuracy of a numerical travelling fire model implemented in a software called GoZone. The assessment is done mainly by comparison of relevant output in a fire compartment such as fire growth rate as well as by comparison of gas temperature, rate of heat released and resulting steel temperature. In the framework of this paper, only a part of the entire assessment focused on office building is presented.