Estimating the Heat Transfer from an Electric Vehicle Fire using Fire Dynamics Simulator

Abstract

In this thesis guidelines for modeling a vehicle using Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) and its relevant parameters are explored and documented through an estimation and comparison to experimental data. Vehicle construction consists of determining fire spread and subsequent burner delineation from analysis of the experimental data, of which two geometries evolve. One with fire spread across multiple burners located under the vehicle, on the hood, in the cabin, and at the rear of the vehicle shaped geometry. The second, a single rectangular burner used to represent the burning vehicle. These two geometries are compared with each other and the experimental data to determine model validation.

The selected vehicle for this study was a 2020 electric Hyundai Kona which was experimentally free burned by the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI) in February of 2024. The heat flux, mass loss rate, and video evidence from this experiment was used to build a FDS model of the performed experiment. The model is used to create guidelines to simulate vehicle fires, compare the single burner model to the multi-burner model, and compare the simulated lateral heat flux against experimental data. It is found that the single burner model's lateral heat flux was comparable to the multi-burner model and the experiment.