Comparison of Numerical and Experimental Results of Fire Induced Doorway Flows

The ability to calculate the changes to vent flows when a sprinkler activates can lead to improved predictions of fire environments outside of the room of origin in sprinklered occupancies, ultimately leading to an engineering design tool based on numerical simulations. Hence, for the current study, numerical calculations using NIST Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) are compared with real scale compartment experimental data for unsprinklered and sprinklered cases. Mass flow rate and temperature are typical parameters used to quantify the flow induced by a fire in a compartment. Hence, numerical results for doorway mass flow rate and temperature are compared with the experimental data for three fire sizes in order to validate the numerical model. Then, using current experimental data for sprinkler characteristics, numerical calculations for doorway mass flow rate and temperature are compared with the experimental data for the three fire sizes of the sprinklered case.