An analysis of the Waldbaum supermarket fire, Brooklyn, NY, August 3, 1978 is presented. It is argued that the fire went from flaming to smoldering and back to flaming over a period of several hours. This mostly hidden fire broke into the loft and led to the collapse of the roof. As a result, 12 firefighters feil into the flames and six perished. The fire was never satisfactorily explained, and a retrial of a man convicted of arson prompted this analysis.

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Simple equations for predicting the fire temperatures of the room of origin and the connected corridor are proposed. These are obtained by applying the existing equation for predicting pre-flashover compartment fire temperature by Quintiere et al. to ventilation controlled fire. The results of the predictions using the simple equations are compared with the predictions by a more detailed computer fire model. The accuracy of the equations is as good as the computer model and deemed to be acceptable for many of such practical applications as structural fire safety designs of buildings.

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Four plume algorithms used by three zone type building fire simulators are evaluated against experiential data of Steckler and Nakaya. Significant differences in the room flow predictions are found with even the best performing plume algorithms predicting flows well below the measured values. Differences in plume behavior is attributed to (1) the background noise (turbulence) present when the data used in formulating the algorithms was collected, and (2) the inability of the plume algorithms to easily simulate the effect of plume blowing.
The behavior of the McCaffrey plume in situations were the over-fire region dominates the plume flow is discussed.

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Theoretical and experimental numerical analysis have proposed the capable of being executed computational finite difference method for fire induced natural convective heat flow using the viscous heat conductive compressible fluid with K-ε model in the fire compartment. Because two-point upwind difference scheme give the numerical viscosity, the computational results are different from the approximate solutions at the large velocity. The practical stability and the truncation errors for computing finite difference equations approximating fire governing equations have been introduced by theoretical numerical analysis. The sensitivities of numerical solutions have been evaluated by the theoretical and experimental numerical analysis. As the results of numerical experiments we proposed that the reasonable time interval and space mesh size are chosen considering the CPU time. Furthermore we have introduced the Re^* for the equation of motion or Pe^*for the equation of energy. We proposed that the values of Re^* and Pe^* indicate the trust in the approximate solutions in consequence of the numerical experiments.

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Flame tip height, width, and height to base of a lifted flame, formed by a ejected fuel gas through a pipe of 1/8B, 1/4B, 3/8B, 1/2B, 3/4B, and 1B, were observed as a function of dimensionless heat release rate. Fuel gas was supplied at the rate of 100l/min, 200l/min, and 400l/min. Pipe heights from the ground level were set at 200mm, 700mm, and 1700mm. Radiative heat fluxes were also measured at 0.1m, 0.27, 0.71m, 1.1m, 1.27m, 1.71m, 1.9m, 2.9m, from the pipe. Temperatures along the center line of the flame were measured. Dimensionless flame height. Ha/D, and dimensionless flame width, Wf/D were correlated well by 1/3 power of dimensionless heat release rate. Radiative heat fluxes to the dummy vessel were also estimated using the view factor and center-line temperature. Estimated radiative heat fluxes to the targets were compared with the measured ones and good agreement between them was obtained. This implies that the view factor on radiative heat flux to the target from a jet flame is useful to estimate the radiative heat flux to assess the fire safety.

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The smoke production from the burning of crude oil was investigated for a 1m diameter pan and for a 2.7m × 2.7m pan, which is the largest pan size used within a fire test facility for smoke characterization. The smoke yield, as measured by two procedures both based on the carbon balance method, increased by about 50% as the pan size increased. Analysis of the smoke by transmission electron microscopy showed that the volume mean diameter of the primary spheres increased by about 80% as the pan size increased. These results are compared with other studies ranging in scale from a pool diameter as small as 8.5cm to as large as 12m crude oil "spill" fires and 100m pool fires set during the 1991 war in Kuwait.

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The physical process of heat and mass transfer in concrete walls was described by a model. The model consist of heat conduction in the skeleton, mass (air, water vapor and adsorbed water) transfer in the pore. The desorption of the adsorbed water and the decomposition of the water of crystallization were included explicitly. The model was applied to two practical problems. The first application was to investigate the variation of insulation performance of flat wall by the change in initial water content. The range of variation was quantified and compared with the variation caused by mix design. From the calculated results, a methodology was proposed to carry out the mix design of concrete for arbitrate required insulation performance taking into account of the variation caused by uncertainty in initial water content. The second application was to define the optimum cross sectional shapes of composite floor of profiled steel sheet and concrete. The model was extensively used to analyze the dependence of the insulation performance upon the cross sectional shape. Simple but useful concept of "thermally optimum" was proposed to assure sufficient insulation performance.

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