Development of predictive simulation tools for wall assembly fire performance

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Fire performance of materials and wall systems are critical issues that need to be carefully addressed to minimize losses and property damage in the event of a fire. As a result, building products act as barriers to the spread of fire, resulting in significant increase in valuable time for safe evacuation of occupants and limiting material damage. In addition to thermal insulation capabilities, our next generation wall assembly materials need to show improved fire performance, particularly with respect to their fire resistance rating. This fire performance is determined through full scale fire tests for regulatory purposes. However, only a limited number of large scale tests can be performed due to facility availability and cost. Given the high costs associated with large scale fire tests and scaling issues between small and full scale fire scenarios, well formulated numerical simulation tools have the potential to bridge the gap between the different sources of experimental information and to costeffectively provide reliable predictions of material response to various fire conditions leading to optimization in use of existing products and significantly reduced design costs. The objectives of this project are to investigate the capabilities of current computational tools to model the fire performance of walls, and to develop multi-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) heat transfer calculation methods for building thermal barriers. The computational developments will use recent experimental results from small and large scale tests to modify and refine the original methods, such that the final tools should be suitable for use in design of new wall assemblies. Transient fluid-heat transfer simulations will be performed with increasing levels of physical description to evaluate the thermal performance of insulation materials under different exposure conditions. Ultimately, modeling of room fire spread and full interactions with the wall are envisaged. The development of predictive simulation tools for wall assembly fire performance will allow optimization of wall configurations and reduce costs for the design of wall assemblies using new materials. In the longer term, outcomes of the described research will result in significant market expansion, improved life safety through building construction and new product development, as well as having a driving impact in terms of improved construction practices and future modifications to building code and related regulations.