Who We Are?

The fundamental responsibility of our engineers is the design of systems that satisfy the overall goals and objectives for a given facility. When it comes to fire and life safety, the fire protection engineer (FPE) is called upon to design those systems deemed necessary to meet the performance objectives for the project. However, before specific protection systems can be designed, decisions must be made regarding what systems are most appropriate and necessary in light of the fire events of concern, and the overall outcomes to be achieved at the conclusion of these events.

While many modern buildings do not fit well with the requirements of prescriptive codes, performance-based design promotes a better understanding of how a building would perform in the event of a fire. Compliance with prescriptive codes and standards is intended to result in a building that is “safe” from fire.

Through the process of performance-based design, typically, our FPEs defines the project scope, identify goals, define objectives, develop performance-based criteria, develop the scenarios and design fires, develop trial design(s) and at last evaluate the trial design.

To do so, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is used as a general analysis tool for the full breadth of fluid flow problems including those associated with fire. CFD provides the potential to study these complicated problems that are only partially amenable to reduced-scale physical modeling because of the large number of non-dimensional groups that need to be preserved to simulate full-scale behavior. Furthermore, CFD has emerged as an important tool because the assumptions employed in zone models limit their range of application to relatively simple fire scenarios that can be described in terms of a small number of idealized components (e.g., unperturbed fire plume, unconfined ceiling jet, uniform hot gas layer).

The starting point for CFD models is the set of partial differential equations that assert conservation of mass, momentum, and energy within the fire and throughout the space surrounding it. These equations are solved numerically to yield time-varying predictions of temperature, gas velocity, gas species concentrations, and so forth, on a three dimensional mesh of control volumes that spans the geometry being modeled. Unlike to zone models, CFD models enforce the conservation laws in each of the thousands or millions of relatively small control volumes.