From Theory to Practice - Implementing FDS developments into streamline fire safety assessment

The tools utilized in fire engineering are in continuous development as well as the methods employed to address tunnel safety in fire emergency scenarios, this is the case of FDS (Fire dynamics simulator) in the context of tunnel fire safety. Over recent years, FDS has seen improvements in its capabilities to simulate fires in tunnels. Recent additions include a new pressure calculation tool (tunnel preconditioner), and advancements in tools to represent complex geometries more accurately (unstructured geometries that are being introduced and validated in the actuality).

Professionally, these developments in the simulation software used to execute our simulations prompt us to explore their utility aiming to achieve the optimal balance between accuracy and speed to provide solid fire safety assessments that are compatible with our client’s time constraints.

Consequently, this paper proposes different tunnel fire scenarios and evaluates through the simulation time and diverse FDS outputs the configurations that we use in our professional practice and variations that incorporate the previously mentioned new functionalities. Through this process the aim is to determine the improvements in our calculations, along with new approaches that could be adopted to enhance our simulations and streamline tunnel fire modeling. Through this process the aim is to determine the improvements in our calculations, along with new approaches that could be adopted to enhance our simulations and streamline tunnel fire modeling.