Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Smoke transport is a fundamental fire phenomenon. One area of interest in fire/life safety is computer modeling of fire and smoke transport. Smoke impairs visibility, and visibility is path-dependent. This paper presents a ray tracing technique for smoke visualization. The method of ray tracing directly addresses visibility from a viewer’s perspective. A case study is performed on a t-square room fire under natural ventilation. The results demonstrate that the implemented ray tracing visualization of smoke visibility is better than other existing methods in CFD. In addition, the visualization results can be used to evaluate smoke dispersion quantitatively. For the room fire examined, the estimated standard deviation of smoke visibility helps identify the transient behavior, which occurs about 2.5 min to 3.5 min into the fire. It is expected that the better understanding of smoke visibility from this technique would benefit fire / life safety design applications.