- Author
- Lee, B. T.
- Title
- Modeling the Dynamic Behavior of Building Fires. Final Report.
- Coporate
- Office of Civil Defense, Washington, DC
- Report
- OCD Work Unit 2536F; SRI Project PYU-8150, August 1971, 51 p.
- Distribution
- Available from National Technical Information Service
- Contract
- DAHC20-70-C-0219
- Keywords
- building fires | fire behavior | scaling | structures | fire spread
- Identifiers
- convective and radiative fields; ambient wind enhancement; room to room fire spread
- Abstract
- The practical modeling of fire behavior in a burning building requires separate techniques for simulation of the convective and radiative fields about the fire. Previously derived scaling methods for modeling the fluid flow environment in mass fires appear applicable to 1/16-scale structural fires. The time duration of a fire can be scaled as the square root of a characteristic dimension of the burning structure upon satisfaction of geometric similarity with the model to which it is being compared. The perturbation of the flow, e.g., the smoke column, by the ambient wind is shown to depend on wind velocity, burning rate, and fire size.