Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Driven by the need for high performance and reduction of the ownership cost of commercial and military structures, both composite and aluminum materials have been used extensively. Protection of these advanced structures from fire is a critical issue in structural design and certification. Current limited analysis capability via the commercial tools has forced the design reliant on a large number of component and structural level fire tests of a pre-loaded structure. The main focus of this research is to develop an Abaqus Fire Interface Simulator Toolkit (AFIST) by integration of a customized Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) with a customized Abaqus structural analyzer through a two-way coupling. A real fire environment is simulated using FDS and its impact on the thermal-mechanical response of the structure is fully captured by Abaqus. Exchange of heat and mass at the coupling interface is achieved based on the averaged energy and mass conservation operating over a given spatial and temporal domain. The coupled FDS and Abaqus results are displayed through VTK and Paraview. Demonstration and validation examples are presented to illustrate the tool capability for simulating the multiple coupling interfaces, flame spread, and thermal and mass diffusion. The simulation results from AFIST are compared with the prediction from the standalone FDS and experimental data published in the literature.