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Design of Sports Facilities
Published in Franz Konstantin Fuss, Aleksandar Subic, Martin Strangwood, Rabindra Mehta, Routledge Handbook of Sports Technology and Engineering, 2013
ETFE is a recyclable material with a mass of one one-hundredth of an equivalent-sized glass panel. This plastic material is strong, lets in more ultraviolet light than glass and thoroughly cleans itself with every rain shower. It is also a better insulator than glass and is much more resistant to the weathering effects of sunlight (ARUP 2005). The disadvantageous effect of ETFE lies in its combustibility and thus did not follow the prescriptive rules of the Chinese Building Code. However, ETFE shrinks away from a fire, so is thus effectively ‘self-venting’ and lets smoke out of the building (ARUP 2005). How smoke and heat would spread through the building and how the performance of different smoke exhaust rates would keep smoke away from exiting people, was modelled with ‘fire dynamics simulator’, a computational fluid dynamics-based model of fire-driven fluid flow. Eventually, the Water Cube was the first Olympic site in Beijing to receive approval for fire engineering, owing to thorough performance-based fire engineering tailored to the building (ARUP 2005).
Design, Investigation, and Case Studies
Published in James G. Quintiere, Principles of FIRE BEHAVIOR, 2016
A popular fire field model is the fire dynamics simulator (FDS). It is described in literature and can be downloaded from NIST along with the computer code in a user-friendly rendition. It was released in 2000 and is currently being used by several thousand people around the world for a wide range of applications from design to investigation. A review paper on the model describes its limitations and its ability.23 It cites three issues with such a model of fire: (1) fire has many scenarios, models cannot do all; (2) the computational power of computers is limited, but always improving; and (3) models are needed to predict how real objects burn, and this is not possible today. A big limitation is the ratio of largest to smallest scale that is needed to model all fire phenomena. Fire in a building may need 10’s of meters to indicate geometry, and predicting combustion from fundamentals requires a cell size smaller than a millimeter. This requires a ratio of scales, largest to smallest, of about 100,000. To capture all of this range is impossible with current computers. So in the rendition of large building spaces the cell size is practically selected to be of the order of a meter or slightly less to get the code to complete the calculation in less than a day or two. This means that unless phenomena such as combustion that occur at much smaller scales are not dealt with in special ways to insure their accurate prediction, the results pertaining to combustion and other small-scale phenomena can be poor. Despite these limitations such codes can be very powerful in giving a detailed output for the fire and smoke. An example is its ability to compute the turbulent flame shape over intervals of time as shown in Figure 10.29. The model captures the dynamics of the turbulent flame and its oscillatory nature very well. On average, its predicted flame height agrees well with the formula in Chapter 7, and that formula correlates a wide range of experimental data.
Designing a Two-Level Steel Cable-stayed Bridge against Fires
Published in Structural Engineering International, 2023
Zhi Liu, Guobiao Lou, Jing Hou, Guoqiang Li
The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) was employed to reproduce fire environments. FDS is an open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) program developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It establishes a large-eddy model to simulate the fire-driven fluid flow by numerically solving the Navier–Stokes equations. It can characterize the transient temperature field more realistically with a high-fidelity gradient. FDS fire models necessitate defining the domain of meshes in which the simulation will be carried out. The domain has boundary conditions on its edges and is discretized into multiple rectilinear cells. Obstructions that can potentially affect the fire-driven gas flow need to be incorporated along with the fire source with its combustion characteristics. In the performed study, fire environments were modeled inside the space with the sizes of 40.5 m wide (lateral bridge direction), 20 m long (longitudinal bridge direction), and 9 m high (vertical direction). Cube cells with a 0.5-m side length were adopted to discretize the numerical space. Fire sources were reproduced according to HRRs per unit areas, footprint areas, and lasting times defined previously.
Performance-based prioritisation of fire protection for steel girder overpasses in a complex highway interchange
Published in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, 2020
Zheda Zhu, Spencer E. Quiel, Aerik Carlton, Kevin A. Mueller, Shalva M. Marjanishvili
Fire models of varying complexity have been previously implemented by other researchers and practitioners to calculate the response of bridges to tanker truck pool fires. The majority of these efforts have used models of fire and heat transfer at either the very simple (Garlock et al., 2012; Kodur, Aziz, & Dwaikat, 2013) or very complex (Alos-Moya, Paya-Zaforteza, Hospitaler, & Rinaudo, 2017; Choi, 2008; Wright, Lattimer, Woodworth, Nahid, & Sotelino, 2013) ends of the computational spectrum. Simple models typically consist of standard hydrocarbon fire curves such as in the Eurocode (CEN, 2002) or ASTM E1529 (ASTM, 2016), which represent the fire exposure as a prescribed time history of temperature or heat flux. Complex models typically utilise computational fluid dynamics solvers such as the Fire Dynamics Simulator developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (McGrattan et al., 2013).
Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Fire Risk in Historic Chinese Temples: A Case in Beijing
Published in International Journal of Architectural Heritage, 2022
Chaoping Huai, Jingchao Xie, Fang Liu, Jiangtao Du, David H.C. Chow, Jiaping Liu
Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is widely used among fire study groups to simulate building fires, including smoke and flow characteristics (Byström et al. 2012; Chen et al. 2010; Tung et al. 2018; Weinschenk, Overholt, and Madrzykowski 2016). In the literature, most fire models of wooden buildings are relatively simple and the models may not be advanced enough, resulting in less accuracy for fire simulation in compartments with combustible structural materials (Östman, Brandon, and Frantzich 2017). Besides, few large-scale fire experiments have been carried out on historic wooden buildings; therefore, additional full-scale tests with pyrolysis parameters of historical wood are needed to provide information on fire spread.