CFD Modeling of Industrial Scale Fire Growth and Suppression

Project Description

FireFOAM is the cutting-edge fire
modeling code emerged from collaborated research effort led by FM Global,
and begins to impact the scientific and engineering community of fire
protection. The parallel enabled CFD code handles complex geometry and
properly represents the complex multi-physics multi-scale fire phenomena.
However due to the limit of in-house cluster and the complexities related to
multi-region interactions, the code is currently only operate at the order
of 100 CPUs. Extension of this limit is possible, but requires dedicated
research and hardware resources. The Director¹s Discretion Award allocation
could make this code advancement possible. Currently the numerical study of
large scale fire growth and suppression is in its early stage, operating at
reduced scale and very coarse grid. Parametric model analysis has not been
possible due to the speed limit. The proposed research targets on scaling
and speeding up the simulation, and will m
ake full-scale simulation more
efficient and proper parametric model analysis possible.
From business
perspective, predictive modeling capability of large-scale fire suppression
will help to interpret, interpolate and extrapolate limited large scale
experimental data, and provide cost effective alternative and reduce number
of fire tests required for providing fire protection technology and
protection standard. A typical large scale fire test costs on the order of
100K US dollars. The model advances through the research will lead to
improved protection technology and practice. The benefits on reducing
properties/business loss and saving human lives are invaluable. Moreover, a
reliable fire protection system plays key part in achieving sustainability
by reducing carbon footprint and other adverse environmental impact
associated with fire, suppression and rebuilding.