Froude Modelling of Fire Phenomena: Observation of Fire-induced Smoke Movement in Basement Structure for Firefighting Purpose

Abstract

Serious consideration of fire phenomena has become mandatory as many strict requirements in fire safety have been implemented in design, construction, management of building, and firefighting strategy. One of the most important features of building nowadays is basement which in fire condition imposes severe threat as smoke and heat movement tend to move upside going through means of egress. Aside from threat to the tenant and building structure, fire – induced smoke is also extremely dangerous to the firefighter during fire fighting operation involving enclosure conditions such as a building fire or even a basement fire situations. One way to study smoke movement and design effective measures in mitigating fire hazard is to conduct experimental fire test by using smaller geometry represent actual real building. This paper study fire – induced smoke movement in 1:8 scale of basement structure represent actual basement facility used for firefighter training. By assuming that smoke movement and temperature distribution is mainly caused by buoyant force from combustion of fire source, Froude number is maintained in the non – dimensional analysis for scaling purpose to hold temperature constant while leaving Reynold number differs from the real scale phenomena. This approach is considered sufficient and acceptable as long as the flow in the small scale model is turbulent enough. Further, result from the fire test in this study was compared with result from fire simulation built using Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) of NIST. Thus, aside from assessing fire phenomena by using Froude modeling and planning effective firefighting strategy in basement fire, this study can also be used as validation study of FDS which is widely used by fire safety engineering community.