Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

This paper examines the effect of various combustion models when predicting the environment in a building arising from fire in a room. The use of a stoichiometric combustion model will usually over-predict the efficiency of the combustion process in the fuel-rich areas and hence over-predict the temperature field. A modified combustion model presented in this paper can improve the predicted results of fire simulation when using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. The modified model is based on the stoichiometric method, but where an oxygen threshold is introduced. The modified model is applied to a CFD program, called the CESAREKFD fire model, and the results obtained were compared with the experimental results. It was found that the predicted results, using the modified combustion model, gave improved results which were in reasonable agreement with experimental results.