Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 124-136 (2012)
FIRE DYNAMIC SIMULATION ON THERMAL ACTIONS IN LOCALIZED FIRES IN LARGE ENCLOSURE
Chao Zhang 1,* and Guo-qiang Li 2
1 College of Civil Engineering, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai 200092, China
2 Sate Key Laboratory for Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai, China
*(Corresponding author: E-mail:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
Received: 11 April 2011; Revised: 14 July 2011; Accepted: 21 July 2011
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ABSTRACT
Large enclosures commonly exist in many buildings like atria, open car parks and airport terminals. There is an international trend to prompt performance-based method (PBM) for fire resistance design. By PBM, the temperatures of structures in design fires should be determined. Localized fires are always adopted as design fires in large spaces. Currently, no agreed calculation method is available for the calculation of the heat flux from a localized fire to a vertical column. This paper aims at providing a feasible way of calculating the thermal actions in localized fires. Particularly, gas temperatures in localized fires and heat transfer from localized fires to steel vertical columns have been numerically investigated. The popular CFD code FDS is adopted as the numerical tool. A design fire scenario and four real localized fire tests are simulated in FDS. The effects of input parameters, including grid size and number of solid angles, on the accuracies of the numerical results have been investigated. Numerical results are compared with correlations and test data, which shows good agreement.
KEYWORDS
Fire Dynamic Simulation (FDS), Steel column, Localized fire, Heat transfer, Temperature calculation, Grid size
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