Development of Design Fires for Performance-Based Fire Safety Designs

Abstract

This paper discusses a procedure for the development of design fires for buildings and presents a study undertaken to quantify design fires for commercial buildings. This procedure includes building surveys, full-scale experiments and computer modelling. In this study, a survey of commercial premises was conducted to determine fire loads and types of combustibles present in these buildings. Based on the results of the survey a number of fuel packages were designed that represent fire loads and combustible materials in commercial buildings. The fuel packages were used to perform full-scale, post-flashover fire tests to collect data on heat release rates, compartment temperatures and production and concentration of toxic gases. Results from these experiments are presented and discussed. The paper also discusses a computer modelling study in which a computational fluid dynamics model was used to simulate the tests and to model a fire in a real-scale commercial store.

Study of Fire Growth Behavior in a Residential Apartment using Fire Dynamic Simulator

“…The burner is producing a constant heat release rate per unit area (HRRPUA) 500 kW/m 2 with a 1.8 m 2 area burner. The heat release rate is used by averaging the total combustible heat release rate [6,8]. Different combustible loads are stated in Table 2.…”

“…This process was done by using a software named Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS). A real fire scenario can be predicted and simulated by FDS as it shows a reliable result with real cases [6][7][8][9]. Any fire growth mechanism like heat release rate, temperature, effects of burning and also evacuation modeling can be done through numerical calculation.…”

Review and Validation of the Current Smoke Plume Entrainment Models for Large-Volume Buildings

“…T-squared fires are defined through fire growth rate coefficient α [kW/s²] and the time of their growth. The standardized growth rates are described by NFPA 92 [1] and are widely used in various fire protection engineering applications [64,65]. The change in HRR = f(t) will also cause a change in the diameter of the fire (if HRR per unit of area is assumed constant) or the change of HRR per unit of area (if the diameter of fire is assumed constant).…”

Stability analysis of large‐span steel truss structure under local cooling from fire extinguishing system

“…The location of a fire source is an important parameter in the design of fire scenes, and statistical methods can be used to determine the probable fire location. If the relevant statistics are not available, the fire load distribution and the users' situation at the scene can be used to determine the location of the fire source . In this study, it is assumed that the midspan area on the first floor has been assigned as the fire location to study a fire extinguishing system using water and the overall mechanical response process of large‐span steel structure under a local abrupt drop in temperature.…”