The zone-particle model for building fire simulation

An effective fire and smoke propagation model is important for evaluating building safety, indicating safe rescue paths in emergencies, and determining proper control strategies. In this paper, a new model to simulate smoke propagation and to characterize mixing behavior is developed. In this model, a function considering the mixing behavior between the hot smoke and cool air is introduced to better resolve the temperature and smoke profiles in the vertical direction. Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) approach is used to obtain the function distribution through reconstructing velocities of marker particles and determining locations of particles in each layer in the zone model. The fundamentals of the model are presented in detail in this paper. A test (a simple building with experimental data and CFD simulation) is used to verify the model, in which experimental data and CFD simulations are compared to predictions from the new model and those from a two-layer model implemented using CFAST (Consolidated Model of Fire and Smoke Transport, developed by NIST). Favorable agreement of the new model results is seen with experiment data or CFD simulations. The new model also provides more accurate prediction of temperature distribution in comparison to the two-layer model.