Fire Simulation for Engineers

Welcome to the Fire Simulation for Engineers manual at Wikibooks, a basic guide to fire simulation for engineering applications using free and open source tools.

This book is intended for professional readers.

Preface

This manual was born as as a standalone tutorial for students of fire safety engineering courses, then it grew to the current state. The original text "An introduction to fire simulation" was donated by its main author Emanuele Gissi and is currently being rebuilt as a Wikibook to facilitate contributions and maintenance.

The main goal of this manual is to introduce the engineer to the complex world of fire simulation, and complements the official documentation of the referred simulation tools. The official documentation for these tools remains an invaluable source of reference for advanced users.

In this manual, topics are organized in a strict logical order and the basics are thoroughly explained to improve the learning curve. Some advanced topics are completely omitted for the sake of simplicity. According to teaching experience, engineers understand the logic behind the fire simulation tools and become autonomous learners after 36 hours of course: they learn to work independently and are able to develop reasonable engineering level applications by themselves.

This manual is not intended to cover research applications of fire simulation.

Fire simulation for engineers

Authors and contributors

This Wikibook is currently being written by:

Emanuele Gissi, PhD, fire officer, Italian Fire and Rescue Service (Corpo nazionale dei Vigili del fuoco), Italy;
Benson Muite, Research Fellow of Distributed Systems, Institute of Computer Science - University of Tartu, Estonia;
Oriol Rios, PhD student, CERTEC - Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain.
Wojciech Węgrzyński, researcher in Fire Research Department, Building Research Institute (ITB), Warsaw, Poland;

Please help us building this Wikibook, introduce yourself at Talk:Fire Simulation for Engineers. Contributions are very welcome!

External links

References

[Hottel 1984] H C Hottel. Stimulation of Fire Research in the United States After 1940 (A Historical Account). Combustion Science and Technology, 39:1–10, 1984.
[FDS5 user’s guide] McGrattan K, Hostikka S, Floyd J, “Fire dynamics simulator (version 5) User guide”, NIST Special Publication 1019-5, 2008.
[FDS5 technical reference] McGrattan K, Bryan K, Hostikka S, Floyd J, “Fire dynamics simulator (version 5) Technical guide”, NIST Special Publication 1019-5, 2008.
[Smokeview user’s guide] Forney G P, “User’s Guide for Smokeview Version 5 - A Tool for Visualizing Fire Dynamics Simulation Data”, NIST Special Publication 1017-1, 2007.
[FDS5+EVAC 2008] Korhonen T, Hostikka S, “Fire dynamics simulator with evacuation, version 5”, VTT Research notes, Espo (Finland), 2008.
[Rehm 1978] R.G. Rehm and H.R. Baum. The Equations of Motion for Thermally Driven, Buoyant Flows. Journal of Research of the NBS, 83:297–308, 1978.
[NUREG 1824] Verification and Validation of Selected Fire Models for Nuclear Power Plant Applications. NUREG 1824, United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC, 2007.
[Grosshandler 1993] W. L. Grosshandler. “RADCAL: A Narrow-Band Model for Radiation Calculations in a Combustion Environment”, NIST TN 1402; 52 p. April 1993.
[Wickstrom 2007] U. Wickstrom, D. Duthinh, and K.B. McGrattan. Adiabatic Surface Temperature for Calculating Heat Transfer to Fire Exposed Structures. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Interflam Conference. Interscience Communications, London, 2007.
[Purser 2002] D.A. Purser. SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering, chapter Toxicity Assessment of Combustion Products. National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, Massachusetts, 3rd edition, 2002.
[Mulholland 2002] G.W. Mulholland. SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering, chapter Smoke Production and Properties. National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, Massachusetts, 3rd edition, 2002.