A simplified representation of travelling fire development in large compartment using CFD analyses

Fires in open large-floor plan spaces do not always reach a post-flashover fire state and recently, the “travelling fire” terminology has been used to define fires burning locally and moving across entire floor plates over a period of time [1]. Several studies have been presented about the behavior of a structure when it is subjected to this fire scenario [2-5]. Due to their limited number, fire tests are not enough to cover all possible configurations encountered in practice, but this limitation can potentially be overcome with help of CFD. In the frame of the European RFCS TRAFIR project, a simplified representation of the fire load was developed to calibrate an FDS model representing large scale travelling fire tests. The numerical and experimental results have been compared in terms of gas and steel temperatures (the radiative intensities and gas temperatures calculated by FDS have been used by SAFIR® to calculate the temperatures in a steel column). The approach provides acceptable representations of fire spread and steel temperatures within reasonable computational demands.