Computational fire engineering should be employed more widely during a building's design stage and life cycle to improve the safety of occupants during a fire.
That was the message from Professor Ed Galea, director of fire safety engineering at the University of Greenwich, at the 'Shaping the future of fire safety' conference held in May.

Speaking at the event, he said: "We need to assess whether our building layouts are safe and efficient and we need to do that during the design stage when the structure is just a bright idea on drawing board, but also through its lifetime modifications."

Modelling software developed by Galea and his team has been used to simulate past events, including those at the World Trade Centre. The software simulates how people behave and how fire spreads in order to discover the time it takes for non-survivable conditions to develop and for the building to be evacuated.

Galea added: "Computer based simulation allows us to demonstrate that the available safe egress time is going to be longer than the required safe egress time. If you can demonstrate that, then your building meets the objectives of the design, and that's the essence of what we're trying to do in fire engineering."

The professor said that the software now has the capability to combine calculations for the evacuation times along with the effects of the fire on the occupants to give more accurate timings.

"By combining the two, we can see the effects that the fire, the smoke or any toxic gases are having on the people trying to evacuate. We no longer have to set arbitrary criteria, we can look at the whole impact of the fire on the evacuation procedure."

Source

Building Sustainable Design