Abstract
The term “travelling fire” is used to label fires which burn locally and move across the floor over a period of time in large compartments. Through experimental and numerical campaigns and while observing the tragic travelling fire events, it became clear that such fires imply a transient heating of the surrounding structure. The necessity to better characterize the thermal impact generated on the structure by a travelling fire motivated the development of an analytical model allowing to capture, in a simple manner, the multidimensional transient heating of a structure considering the effect of the ventilation. This paper first presents the basic assumptions of a new analytical model which is based on the virtual solid flame concept; a comparison of the steel temperatures measured during a travelling fire test in a steel-framed building with the ones obtained analytically is then presented. The limitations inherent to the analyticity of the model are also discussed. This paper suggests that the developed analytical model can allow for both an acceptable representation of the travelling fire in terms of fire spread and steel temperatures while not being computationally demanding, making it potentially desirable for pre-design.
Highlights
Several developments were recently made to represent in a detailed manner the thermal effect of a travelling fire through CFD numerical analyses (Horova [1], Degler et al [2], Charlier et al [3,4], Dai et al [5]), providing a great deal of relevant information in terms of fire dynamics that can be used as input for subsequent structural analyses
This paper suggests that the developed analytical model can allow for an acceptable representation of the travelling fire in terms of fire spread and of steel temperatures, despite limitations inherent to the analyticity of the model, making it potentially usable for the pre-design stage of a building structure
A vertical discretisation is applied to the virtual solid flame to evaluate its temperatures
Summary
Several developments were recently made to represent in a detailed manner the thermal effect of a travelling fire through CFD (computational fluid dynamics) numerical analyses (Horova [1], Degler et al [2], Charlier et al [3,4], Dai et al [5]), providing a great deal of relevant information in terms of fire dynamics that can be used as input for subsequent structural analyses. Progress in numerical modelling is crucial, it is important to expand and advance the analytical models for structural design and pre-design purposes. Analytical methods are complementary to more complex and less accessible numerical ones They provide scientific and reliable routes commonly used by practitioners to quickly and develop schemes, understand the relationships between parameters and provide a means to independently check numerical solutions. These methods can sometimes present limitations inherent to their simplicity but their results can, where there is necessity in doing so, be improved numerically at a later stage. As for numerical models, it is important to improve analytical ones too, to allow them to match the complexity of the considered problem
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