MSc Lecture 9:

Fire Safety Engineering

/ Fire Modeling

Professor W.K. Chow

Department of Building Services Engineering
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong, China
27 Oct 2015

MScFDModel15a.ppt

 With the rapid development of the construction

industry and the trend moving towards green and
sustainable buildings, it might be difficult for some
new architectural features to comply with the
prescriptive fire codes.
Implementing engineering performance-based fire
codes or application of fire safety engineering might
be a solution.
In Hong Kong, such code is not yet available,
though the Authority is attempting to work out such
codes within three years.

 During this transition period, fire engineering

approach on fire safety provisions is acceptable.
Techniques in fire safety engineering can be applied
by professionals to demonstrate their design will be
equivalent to what are expected in the current
prescriptive codes.
In supporting the argument, fire models were used
frequently.

Topics covered

Current fire models available in the literature will be

briefly introduced.

Fire zone models and fire field models (application of

Computational Fluid Dynamics or Numerical Heat
Transfer) are discussed.

How they are used in some projects with fire safety

provisions, both active protection systems and passive
building construction elements, through fire engineering
approach are outlined.

Only an introduction, student should take subject

Computational Fire Modelling for Building Design.

1. Introduction
Fire codes in most countries or cities are basically
prescriptive, governing passive building constructions
and active fire protection systems such as in Hong
Kong.
The codes were developed decades ago with some
slight modifications.
They are demonstrated to be good for fire safety
provisions in buildings which are relatively simple and
not for complex usage.
Modern architectural design features might have
difficulties in complying with those fire safety codes.
There had been numerous arguments on providing
fire safety for some new buildings in the past few
years.
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Four Levels of Fire Codes

Chow W.K. and Dong X., Legislation, Codes of Practice
and Standards in Hong Kong and Mainland China, In:
P. Stollard, Fire from First Principles, A Design Guide to
International Building Fire Safety, Chapter 10, 4th
Edition, Routledge (2014).

Engineering Performance-Based Fire Codes

Performance-Based Design
Fire Engineering Approach
Prescriptive Code
Performance-Based Design (PBD) applied as Fire
Engineering Approach (as in Hong Kong).
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 The hidden adverse effects on fire hazard for the

following architectural features were discussed:

Internal building voids might give smoke and even flame

spreading rapidly due to enclosure effects.

Double-skin faade might give faster vertical fire

spreading rate.

Excessive natural ventilation design with air flow induced

by wind on wind loading and smoke spreading.

Using good thermal insulation envelope materials might

set off flashover rapidly as demonstrated by several
incidents of burning the entire double-deck bus within 15
minutes.

Environmental friendly buildings to provide more natural

ventilation.

Use of new materials.

Changes in the style of living.

Office Towers with Glass Curtain Wall

More Daylighting
High OTTV due to high solar heat8 gain

A double-skin faade system is proposed to overcome the

problem.

Two glass panes are installed parallel to each other, leaving an

air gap in-between. Air will be driven mechanically to flow
through this cavity to bring away the heat accumulated there.

Natural lighting can still be introduced into the building inside.

Different from double-glazing.

Glass

Glass
Solar heat

Heat transfer
reduced

Air : Take out heat

2m

 Any fire safety problems in Double-skin Faade ?

Flame impingement
Spreading of smoke/flame

Flashover fire

Inner glass might

be broken by
pressure

Outer glass not

Might be even downward depends

on pressure distribution due to
natural or mechanical ventilation.

Air gap
up to 2 m

Glass
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 Obviously fire codes, even including those by NFPA,

cannot be updated so rapidly to cope with the
changes.
This is particularly obvious for buildings of special
hazards requiring individual design considerations,
leading to Engineering Performance-Based Fire Codes
(EPBFC) or the new subject discipline of Fire Safety
Engineering (FSE).
Scientific research for fire safety provision must be
enhanced.
This is different from traditional fire engineering
based on prescriptive codes.
There, routine cut and paste designs, say on fire
services installations, are commonly carried out.
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 Taking Hong Kong as an example, those four fire

prescriptive codes are following those developed
decades ago, though with some modifications.
These codes are demonstrated to be good for fire
safety provisions in buildings which are relatively
simple and not for complex usage.
Modern architectural design features have given new
challenges to fire safety design.
Therefore, fire codes should be updated in order to
cope with those rapid changes.
This is particularly obvious for buildings of special
hazards requiring individual design considerations.
But doing this without strong scientific fire research
for local safety provision is impossible.
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 The prescriptive codes, basically on

FSI Codes (latest 2012)

FS Code

may not be sufficient for providing fire safety in

some buildings with special designs.
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BD-FS Code Combined 3 Old Passive Fire Codes

MoE Codes

MoA Codes

BS5588?

FRC Codes

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 Note that there are no EPBFC in Hong Kong yet.

But for those buildings having difficulties to satisfy
the prescriptive fire codes on passive building
construction, a fire engineering approach (FEA)
will be accepted by the government Buildings
Department (BD) since 1998.
In applying FEA, a fire safety evaluation report has
to be submitted to the Fire Safety Committee (FSC)
under BD for consideration.
This gives an opportunity of applying fire safety
engineering, particularly fire models.

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FEA in Hong Kong

Passive
(Buildings Department BD)

Active
(Fire Services Department FSD)

New project

Design revised

PBC design
following FS
code

FSI design
following FSI
code

Submission
to BD

Submission
to FSD

Design revised
Y

Opportunities
for revision ?

FEA
Y

Fire hazard assessment

by fire consultant

Approved ?

Approved ?

Opportunities
for revision ?

FEA ?

FEA ?
Y

Fire hazard assessment

by fire consultant

Fire Engineering Report

considered by FSC, BD

FEA

Design rejected

Design rejected

Fire Engineering Report

considered by ACFSO, FSD
Y

Opportunities
for revision ?

Approved ?

Project approved

Approved ?

Opportunities
for revision ?
N

Design
rejected

Design
rejected

Process for Approving Fire Safety Designs

(Ref: Chow W.K. and Dong X., Legislation, Codes of Practice and Standards in Hong Kong and
Mainland China, In: P. Stollard, Fire from First Principles, A Design Guide to International
Building Fire Safety, Chapter 10, 4th Edition, Routledge (2014))
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2. Fire Models
Prescriptive fire codes have to be updated actively,
but this takes time to come up with a document.
In the transition period, performance-based fire
codes or FEA has to be used.
Fire engineering tools including fire models (though
not the only method) are applied for hazard
assessment.

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Modelling different stages of a fire:

Ignition model requiring combustion chemistry with

intermediate reactions. Thermal conduction dominates at the
early stage but thermal radiation becomes more important at
the later stage.

Modelling of fire plume, very useful in studying smoke

movement.

Pre-flashover fire to understand the fire environment before

leading to severe damages, results can be applied for assessing
fire services systems such as responses of fire detectors.

Transition to flashover, including application of nonlinear

dynamics.

Post-flashover fire for assessing the consequences to the

building and studying the fire resistance of construction
elements.
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 Carrying out full-scale physical experiments is very

expensive, might be good only for measuring
empirical parameters, validating theories, and fire
investigations.
Many fire models have been developed for studying
pre-flashover fire and reported in literature.
They can be classified as zone models, field
(application of Computational Fluid Dynamics CFD
or Numerical Heat Transfer NHT) models and
airflow network models.
If used carefully, they are suitable for simulating the
fire environment for design purposes.
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3. Zone Models
Many zone models, e.g. Fire Simulation Technique
FIRST, Consolidated Model of Fire Growth and
Smoke Transport CFAST, BRI2, ARGOS and
NRCC had been validated (or verified?) by
different research groups in different parts of the
world.
They are demonstrated to be good for simulating
fire in general compartments (of normal dimensions
up to 10 m) including multi-room structure.
There are one-layer, two-layer and multi-layer zone
models.
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Why indoor fires are more dangerous ?

Lost Heat and Mass to Outside

Room: Heat and Mass Trapped

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Three minutes to flash-over

Burning to save lives Ecos, Issue 59, Autumn, 1989, CSIRO, East Melbourn, pp.4-9

Ceiling jet
Hot gas buoyant layer
Hot gas out
Convection
Plume
Radiation
FIRE
Fuel
Conduction

Cool air in

Key equations of Zone Models

m
E

T
V

Mass
Internal energy
Upper layer
Density
U
Temperature
Layer interface
Volume
Lower
layer L

Plume

Natural vent
Fire

There are 11 variables and 11 equations:

(mU, EU, U, TU, VU), (mL, EL, L, TL, VL), P (pressure)
7 constraints on those 11 variables
Only (11-7) or 4 equations are solved for 4 variables.
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 This kind of model can predict the fire

environment in a multi-compartment building.
The fire is specified in terms of either the mass
loss rate of the fuel or the heat release rate.
The transient smoke layer thickness, the
associated hot gas temperature, the temperature
of the lower cool air zone, the vent flow, and
the radiative heat acting at an object etc. in
each room can be predicted.

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FIRST
The model Fire Simulation Technique FIRST
comes from HAVARD-N which is perhaps one
of the early fire zone models.
The model was written in FORTRAN with the
source code available and so it can be executed
in any computer after compilation.
There is no colourful graphical pre-processing
nor post-processing programmes as the others
such as CFAST.
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 The input file can be prepared by running the

file FIRST.EXE for inputting the geometry of
the room, fire sizes, vent sizes etc.
An output data file will be generated and the
necessary information can be read by printing
or editing the output file.
Some sort of preliminary graphics would be
obtained by printing the results in text mode.
It was developed (in 1990!) to run in minicomputers (i.e. several hours of CPU time in an
PC-486 to a few minutes in a mini-Vax 8500)!
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CFAST

The model Consolidated Model of Fire Growth and

Smoke Transport CFAST developed at the Building and
Fire Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards
and Testing, U.S.A. is one of the most recent zone models
with updated development available in literature.

This model can predict the fire environment in a multicompartment building.

The fire is specified in terms of either the mass loss rate of

the fuel or the heat release rate.

The transient smoke layer thickness, the associated hot gas

temperature, the temperature of the lower cool air zone,
the vent flow, and the radiative heat acting at an object etc.
in each room can be predicted.
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29

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 A major problem in using two-layer zone model is

whether a clear two-layer structure is formed for
fires in special buildings such as an atrium, long
corridor, tunnel or big enclosed space.
Experimental verification is necessary and should
be carried out as soon as possible to understand the
smoke spreading mechanisms.
There might be problems in using a zone model for
simulating fires in a building with a sloped ceiling.
For example, entrainment for a ceiling jet could be
very different from that for a flat roof.

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 In an atrium fire, a smoke layer might not form if

buoyancy of hot gases is insufficient.
Even if the heat release rate of the fire is strong
enough, it would take time for the smoke front to
travel up, move to the walls as a ceiling jet, and then
reentrained to form a stable smoke layer.
There would be a time delay by summing up the
three components.

There are now proposals on using symbolic

mathematics for two-layer zone models.

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4. Fire Field (CFD or NHT) Model

In the past decade, the technique of computational
fluid dynamics (CFD) or numerical heat transfer
(NHT) (or called field modelling technique for the
case on fire simulation) has been developed and
used to some extent for design purpose.
This is good for predicting fire environment in big
enclosures such as an atrium or a tunnel.
Although the computing time required was very
long, the problem has been improved with efficient
numerical schemes and fast computers.
A three-dimensional simulation can be executed
successfully in personal computers.
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 Field models had been applied to simulate the fireinduced field of flow, temperature and smoke
concentrations within an enclosure.
At the moment, the flow and temperature field can
be simulated successfully by taking the burning
object as a heat source.
To the best of knowledge, combustion effects of the
burning process had not been simulated successfully
apart from using the simple chemical reacting
system approach, although attempts were made to
use the flamelet model to develop a chemistry
library, and use empirical formula on the burning
rate.
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 The field model is a natural convection problem

good only for predicting the flow field driven by
buoyancy at distance away from the fire source.
Flame spread process cannot be simulated
realistically without studying the combustion
chemistry.
But the predicted results are good enough for
assessing performance of some fire protection
systems.

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 The thermal power resulted by a fire in an

enclosure is of the order of MW, such as that
produced by burning a polyurethane foam sofa.
The resultant flow is turbulent with the use of
turbulence models.
Different approaches were proposed to deal with the
problem:
Reynolds Averaging of Navier-Stokes Equation
(RANS)
Large Eddy Simulation (LES)

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Reynolds Averaging of Navier-Stokes Equation (RANS)

The time-averaged values of the air flow variables including

the momentum, density, pressure, enthalpy and smoke
concentration are solved.

Any instantaneous value of those variable t is expressed as its

time averaged value plus the fluctuation ':
t = + '

(1)

The set of equations describing conservation laws on t can be

transformed in terms of with the product of the fluctuation
terms ' for different flow variables separated out.

Different turbulent models are proposed to close the set of

equations to make it look similar to those for t, but the
diffusion coefficient concerned will be replaced by an effective
value which is much greater than the laminar one.
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Large Eddy Simulation (LES)

Turbulent motion is decomposed as large- and
small-scale motions by filtering.
The large-scale flow structures would be calculated
numerically by solving the differential equations
concerned.
Small-scale motions will be modeled by subgridscale Reynolds stresses.

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Example:
Domain

5 MW fire

63 m
80 m
99 m

Airport terminal
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No title has been set for this run.

6.00ms-1

a) Velocity vectors

6.00E+00

Min: 2.93E-02

Max: 8.19E+00

200 oC/ 500 oC/ 700 oC /900 oC

b) Air temperatures

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RANS:CFX

LES:FDS

Velocity vectors predicted for plume

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5. Education and Training

There had been criticisms that professionals are not
too familiar with fire models.
However, the topic itself is developing actively, even
research workers found difficulties in catching up
with the rapid development of literature on
approaches other than their own.
CFD/NHT had been used once for studying the fire
induced flow without a turbulence model in one of
the FEA projects!
Note that CFD/NHT itself is a rapidly developing
subject, even in describing the turbulent effects,
there had been lots of arguments on using different
approaches such as RANS or LES!
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 As pointed out recently, both building designers and

relevant government officials should be properly
trained in using fire models.
Note that the development of fire model itself is
very rapid.
For example, three-dimensional
simulation with CFD models can be handled readily
with a personal computer now, e.g. FDS.
But 20 years ago, only two-dimensional simulation
could be carried out in a mainframe computer.
Education and training is the key issue. Continued
professional
development
programmes
on
introducing the advanced topics in fire safety
engineering must be offered regularly.
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