Fire safety in modern urban infrastructures: A 3D CFD Approach to complex fires using Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS)

Nowadays, there is a growing reliance on performance-based designs to ensure the safety of modern infrastructure. Traditional methods such as hand calculations or zone models are often insufficient for complex structures like high-rise buildings, auditoriums, or rooms with specific fire protection systems. Conducting experiments at a 1:1 scale is challenging, making numerical techniques, particularly those involving the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), crucial for studying diverse fire scenarios in modern urban infrastructure. This is the focus of current work using different case studies involving a high-rise building, an auditorium, and a room equipped with sprinklers, assuming common fire scenarios. Utilizing FDS, the simulations consider factors like ventilation and combustibles, predicting fire spread in all possible directions within the buildings. The study emphasizes the ability to forecast smoke distribution over time, aiding in the strategic placement of smoke detectors and ventilation systems. The study also briefly discusses the integration of a fire dynamics simulator and evacuation through coupled modelling. This information contributes to the effective design of escape routes, ensuring complete evacuation before smoke and fire reach other parts of the structure. These numerical findings can help firefighters, Govt. authorities, and building architects devise efficient strategies for smoke management and faster evacuation of people. Such realistic predictions of façade fire risks in complex infrastructures prove the capabilities of modelling tools for ensuring the highest level of fire safety.