Numerical modeling of full scale limited ventilation fire tests

Abstract

Underventilated enclosure fires represent one of the largest causes of fire fatalities and understanding their behavior is of great interest. The newest major release of the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) has made significant progress towards providing a tool for accurate modeling of underventilated fire behavior. This study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of the extinction model and two-step combustion model in FDS version 5 by simulating full scale fire tests in an apartment setting with realistic furniture items using heat release rate data from furniture calorimeter and load cell. The extinction model provides a more accurate representation of the fire behavior in the compartment but the oxygen and temperature results are not satisfactory for severely underventilated fires. The effects of the enclosure causes heat release rate data from free-burn calorimeter tests to give a poor representation of the burning behavior of real furniture items in a compartment.