Fires

This workshop will focus on three broad topics, ignition and flame spread over solid materials, fire plume dynamics, and enclosure fires. The mathematical modeling issues associated with these three topics form the basis for theoretical and computational approaches to most fire scenarios. The thermal degradation of solid materials under convective and radiative loading, the propagation of flame and pyrolysis fronts, and the production of gaseous fuel and combustion products form the basis of the first topic. Particular emphasis will be placed on the use of mathematical models of these processes to interpret standard ignition and flammability tests. The experimental database underlying the current understanding of fire plume dynamics will be summarized. Models of fire plumes based on simple integral models coupled to data correlations, and more sophisticated treatments based on computational fluid dynamics will be presented. The role of turbulence modeling and its relation to the computational techniques employed will be explored. Enclosure fire models based on lumped parameter descriptions ("zone models") will be described. The application of both large eddy simulation techniques and k-e turbulence modeling approaches to interior fires in interiors with complex geometries will be discussed.