Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper presents the WPI/Fire computer code. The WPI/Fire computer program is a single room zone-type compartment fire model. It has been used in the analysis of fires and fire safety issues on board surface ships and submarines, subway cars and in buildings.The computer model is a successor to the Harvard Fire Code, Version 5.0 developed in the early 1980's at Harvard University by Prof. Howard Emmons and the computer code FIRST, an advanced version of the Harvard Code written by researchers at the National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Building and Fire Research Laboratory). Like the Harvard Code (and FIRST), the WPI/Fire model is a deterministic, time-dependent, two-layer zone model. It has sophisticated heat transfer routines for the calculation of radiation and convection heat transfer between hot and cold layers, objects and the room boundaries. It calculates flows through multiple door and window vents. Most importantly, it incorporates algorithms for pool fires, gas burners and growing fires as well as fire spread due to target object ignition. The growing fire algorithm accounts for horizontal flame spread growth rates which may be modeled as functions of the incident heat flux to the fuel's surface. Other features include user selected physics subroutines and forced ventilation through doors and windows. . In addition to these features, the WPI/Fire Code incorporates the following major features: • Momentum driven flows through ceiling vents, • two different ceiling jet models for use in detector activation, • forced ventilation for ceiling and floor vents, and . • an interface to a finite difference computer model for the calculation of boundary surface isotherms and hot spots. .