Paper Factory Fire Safety Engineering

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is getting more and more popular in modern designing techniques and Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) as a consequence is increasing its relevance thanks to the information made available by this new designing approach. The interoperability between BIM and FSE are creating a more and more standardized workflow where software such as Pathfinder and Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) allows engineers to simulate people exodus and fire scenarios in a high number of configurations. The paper is going to investigate the modeling from BIM to PyroSim of a paper factory restoration based in Lucca - Italy, where the high fire risk together due to the fire-paper presence, together with a number of different hazards such as:

• highly toxic combustion smoke
• presence of explosive dust.

The present work involved ax existing building where the engineers were some constraint were coming from the geometry of the existing building itself and, as a consequence, a number of innovative solutions had to be investigated to reach the performance level for fire resistance, compartimentation and exodus based on Italian regulation DM 03.08.2015 and its updates. The final paper is going to present the methodology from BIM to FDS models used, evaluation of the major FDS parameter and modelizations used, together with an analysis of the horizontal scalability (efficiency of increasing the hardware resources used to calculate a single scenario) and vertical scalability (efficiency of running multiple fire scenarios at the same time) performed on AMD EPYC ROME 3.3 Gz offered by a cloud HPC provider. The paper is also going to show the results difference obtained using two different FDS versions, to highlight the development work performed by NIST.