Building fire research
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 a significant increase in valuable time for the safe evacuation of occupants and limiting material damage. In addition to thermal insulation capabilities, 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 cost-effectively provide reliable predictions of material response to various fire conditions leading to optimization in the use of existing products and significantly reduced design costs.
In partnership with Rockwool and University of Waterloo Live Fire Research Facility, we have been developing multi-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) heat transfer calculation methods for building thermal barriers and LES of confined fire propagation.
- Compartment fire simulations focusing on the effect of ventilation
In partnership with Canadian Nuclear Safety Committee (CNSC), UW LRFR, Ghent University, we investigated the role of ventilation in the control of compartment fire in nuclear facility.
Thank you to our research partners:
These case studies are only several of our projects. There are many more types of opportunities and case studies. If you'd like to discuss partnering or sponsoring a research project in Turbulent Combustion Modeling or would like more details: