FireFOAM Modeling of Roll Paper Fires and VOF Modeling of Sprinkler Atomization

Project Description

FireFOAM is the cutting-edge fire modeling code that emerged from a collaborated research effort led by FM Global, and is beginning to impact the scientific and engineering of fire protection community. The parallel, unstructured CFD code handles complex geometries and properly represents the complex multi-physics, multi-scales involved in fire phenomena. FireFOAM has now been applied to industrial-scale fire suppression studies to help guide full-scale fire test design. However, due to the limitations of FM Global’s in-house cluster (1200 cores) only moderate scale (e.g. From a business perspective, predictive modeling capability of large-scale fire suppression will help to interpret, interpolate and extrapolate limited large scale experimental data, and provide a cost effective alternative and reduce number of expensive fire tests required for providing guidance to fire protection technology and protection standards. A typical large scale fire test costs on the order of 100K US dollars to conduct. In addition to the high test costs, some high ceiling warehouse storage configurations exceed our current testing capability. Evaluation of such configuration has to rely on numerical investigations. Therefore, the model advances through this research will lead to improved protection technology and practice. The benefits on reducing properties/business loss and saving human lives are invaluable.