Numerical Simulation of Atrium Fire using Two CFD Tools

Abstract

Building fires lead to casualties which are mainly caused by smoke. Therefore, smoke management system is one of the most important factors to be considered in Fire Safety Engineering (FSE). Its major aim is to ensure that lives are protected from heat and smoke [1]. Applying full scale experimental study on fire dynamics research is relatively expensive and time-consuming. Thus, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been widely used in assessments of fire hazards. The most popular models for fire simulation using CFD are zone model and the field model. According to [2], atria, covered shopping malls, convention centers, airport terminals, sport arenas, and warehouses are examples of large spaces for which these conventional zone-model approaches are not always effective. In this paper, numerical simulation of fire-produced smoke movement in a large complex space proposed in [3] has been carried out in field model with two CFD tools, StarCD and FDS. StarCD is a general-purpose, unstructured CFD code that allows extremely complex scenarios often encountered in many situations to be simulated. Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a fire model based on large-eddy simulation CFD code developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The data obtained from calculations based on these two field models are being compared. The results, including the transient development of the smoke profile, temperature distribution and velocity field, etc., are presented and analyzed in this study. It is found that the trend of the results obtained from both of these two CFD tools are in good agreement.