Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

In the French research programme F. I. S. (Feu, Incendie, Sécurité) devoted to the development of scientific approaches of smoke control in buildings, an experimental study was executed at L.E.T. on a scale model (W = lm, L = 2m, H = lm) with a gas burner (28 kW to 70 kW) and a door of adjustable height with natural or forced ventilation (1). A number of numerical computations have been performed with a field model (at L.E.T.) (1) and a zone model (at C.S.T.B.). The objective of this paper is to present and comment the results obtained from the zone model, compared to the experimental results and to the field model results. In a fire situation in which the flow pattern is poorly described by the zone model, we found that the zone model could nevertheless provide useful approximate results for fire safety design.