Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

A method of studying the large scale transport of smoke and hot gases induced by fires in enclosures is described. The approach is based on solving the governing equations directly (if approximately) by decomposing the fire-driven flow field into large scale convective and small scale combustion components. In this work, results involving large scale convective transport generated by flow fields associated with typical fire scenarios are presented. The large scale flow is studied using finite difference techniques to solve large eddy simulations of the Navier-Stokes equations at high Reynolds numbers. No empirical turbulence models are employed. The basic theory behind the methodology is outlined and sample results of both large and small scale phenomena are presented and compared with related experiments.