Abstract
Characterising the risk of the fire spread in informal settlements relies on the ability to understand compartment fires with boundary conditions that are significantly different to normal residential compartments. Informal settlement dwellings frequently have thermally thin and leaky boundaries. Due to the unique design of these compartments, detailed experimental studies were conducted to understand their fire dynamics. This paper presents the ability of FDS to model these under-ventilated steel sheeted fire tests. Four compartment fire tests were modelled with different wall boundary conditions, namely sealed walls (no leakage), non-sealed walls (leaky), leaky walls with cardboard lining, and highly insulated walls; with wood cribs as fuel and ISO-9705 room dimensions. FDS managed to capture the main fire dynamics and trends both qualitatively and quantitatively. However, using a cell size of 6 cm, the ability of FDS to accurately model the combustion at locations with high turbulent flows (using the infinitely fast chemistry mixing controlled combustion model), and the effect of leakage, was relatively poor and both factors should be further studied with finer LES filter width. Using the validated FDS models, new flashover criteria for thermally thin compartments were defined as a combination of critical hot gas layer and wall temperatures. Additionally, a parametric study was conducted to propose an empirical correlation to estimate the onset Heat Release Rate required for flashover, as current knowledge fails to account properly for large scale compartments with thermally thin boundaries. The empirical correlation is demonstrated to have an accuracy of ≈ ± 10% compared with the FDS models.
Highlights
Urbanization is considered as one of the current global challenges
Characterising the risk of the fire spread in informal settlements relies on the ability to understand compartment fires with boundary conditions that are significantly different to normal residential compartments
This paper presents the ability of Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) to model these under-ventilated steel sheeted fire tests
Summary
Urbanization is considered as one of the current global challenges. As population increases, affordable and accessible housing is becoming a key problem. People in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) are forced to build their own low quality Informal Settlements (ISs) resulting in an estimated one billion people, increasing, living within ISs. IS growth is mostly concentrated in the Global South (GS) and in Africa, South East Asia and South America. In 2050, it is estimated that IS populations will rise to 1.2 billion, which will increase the dwellings density in these settlements and, as a direct result, will increase the fire risks [1]. Informal Settlements Dwellings (ISDs) are often built using locally sourced cheap materials, which highly depends on the settlement location.
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