Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Mathematical field models that calculate the movement of smoke within enclosures have now matured to the point at which they are enjoying increasing application particularly to practical building design. This represents just one of two distinct branches of active development in the use of computational fluid dynamics for fire problems. The detailed modeling of combustion in buoyant turbulent diffusion flames also remains an important research objective. Whilst current capabilities may be adequate for the modeling of far-field applications, improved treatments are needed to reliably predict chemical species yield in underventilated fires and to fully couple thermal radiation fields to solid phase pyrolysis.This paper briefly reviews progress in the field modeling of fire. Examples of recent application and development work are used to illustrate current capabilities and suggestions made as to where further work is needed.