Fire Science and Technology

The building facade plays an important role not only for ornament designs, but also for the safety and environmental impacts of the building. To satisfy these demands, the authors have proposed an integrated facade system using diagonally arranged louvers. When considering the safety, not only the structural aspect but also the safety aspect is important. Especially the verification of the behavior of the ejected plume from the building's openings is important as to prevent the fire from spreading. A full scale fire experiment, in which the louvers were attached to the opening, has been carried out. The ejected plume behavior from the opening was verified through temperature and radiated heat measurement around the opening and the louvers and through study of the shape of the plume.

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This study is concerned with simulations of fire phenomena using field equation models. When performing numerical computation of a fire plume accompanied by gas and smoke, the phenomena are expressed through simultaneous non-stationary nonlinear second-order partial differential equations containing advective terms. Those advective terms are then subjected to difference approximations. The ordinary CIP method, which allows us to find an approximate solution using a third-order interpolation function, is often influenced by numerical oscillations emerging specifically with the third-order accuracy, thereby drastically reducing the numerical stability. We developed a new computational algorithm called mCIP method to eliminate these numerical oscillations generated in the numerical computation of partial differential equations when a third-order accurate method is used. A characteristic feature of this mCIP is that it is based on the first-order upwind difference scheme, which does not generate numerical oscillations in those regions where such oscillations may normally occur. We successfully evaluated the performance of this mCIP method and verified its effectiveness by comparing the results of computations with other representative methods, such as CIP method, TVD method and first-order accurate difference method.

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