Fire Dynamics in Multi-Room Compartment Fires

Abstract: Fire dynamics in multi-room compartments are explored in this thesis and new methods to study conditions in rooms adjacent to the room of fire origin are presented. Simple and transparent engineering methods can create good possibilities for understanding different complex phenomena present in fire science. Such methods can also be used in the design process in order to perform rough estimates before more advanced and time-consuming analyses are performed. There are several methods available for studying conditions in the room of fire origin. However, there are few methods that can be used to study the conditions in adjacent spaces. This means that there is a need for developing new fire engineering methods for such spaces. In this thesis two such methods are presented and evaluated. A fire in a single room is complex and the problem increases in complexity when multiple rooms are studied. It can therefore be hard to control all influencing variables and to reproduce fire experiments in multi-room compartments. As a part of the exploration of multi-room compartment fires in this thesis, the reproducibility of a full-scale scenario in a typical apartment building is studied. The temperature varied between ±10-35% around the average temperature depending on scenario, location and time after ignition. An alternative to performing traditional experiments is to use numerical experiments. Numerical experimentation is considered to be a promising research method in fire science, and it is evaluated as a part of this thesis.