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Official regulations and safety concerns require efficient ventilation and detection systems to prevent the possibility of toxic or flammable gas accumulation in hazardous areas, flame spread and smoke buildup. These regulations improve safety in a variety of environments, such as commercial and industrial plants, offshore platforms, chemical plants, office structures, residential buildings, tunnels, trains, ships and aircraft, to name a few. Should a fire or explosion occur, moreover, survivability becomes critical. Designing such survivability into plants and equipment requires detailed knowledge of the comprehensive multiphysics phenomena that occur during such events. Understanding fire and its propagation when designing efficient equipment for fire suppression can save crucial seconds that can often make the difference between life and death, or between mild structural consequences and complete collapse of the building. Identifying how fires develop and determining their effect on neighboring structures is an important part of safety analysis and is essential in assessing the risk of escalation. Engineering solutions from ANSYS provide a cost-effective and accurate means of designing efficient smoke management and detection systems. Simulations of fire scenarios and smoke propagation provide detailed information in a comprehensible form, which helps to optimize the position of detectors, fans, extractors, smoke screens, sprinklers and other fire-fighting systems and to plan emergency procedures. The ANSYS software includes RANS and LES turbulence models as well as hybrid combinations thereof, a variety of combustion models, and state-of-the-art grey and spectral radiation solvers. Conjugate heat transfer is available, as well as full one-way and two-way thermal and mechanical coupling of separate fluid and structural models (fluid structure interaction, or FSI). The latter allows assessment of fire-induced distortion and the associated implications for structural integrity and smoke movement. The influence of atmospheric wind can be incorporated, whether the fire is confined or unconfined. Fire suppression system performance can be examined by predicting the distribution of suppression agents and studying their interactions with the fire and smoke. Our software can analyse low-momentum and high-momentum (jet) fires, and is used to predict well- and under-ventilated fires, flashover and backdraft. The results can be supplied to third-party evacuation/egress software used to predict the time needed to evacuate a building or structure. The unparalleled breadth of solutions across multiple disciplines provides the ability to quantify the behavior of material subjected to fires and/or extreme heat, and possible structural deterioration during catastrophic events can be analyzed in detail using explicit dynamics and structural modeling. The company’s solutions allow for the analysis of explosions that encompass blast waves in the context of homeland security, as well as deflagrations in combustible mixtures. Authorities are now recognizing computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulations of fire scenarios as an important stage in the performance-based design cycle. The results are used to demonstrate that the smoke management system design preserves tenable conditions for occupants, as well as the structural integrity. Using software from ANSYS, variations of the models can be implemented quickly, allowing different smoke management strategies to be investigated and a complete picture of all possible scenarios to be developed. With a proven track record in fire and fire forensics, technology from ANSYS was used in the official Fennel inquiry into the King's Cross fire in London in 1987. Such activities have contributed to the core software development, thereby providing the user with a valuable tool for investigating fire initiation and spread, and for devising input to new regulations and guidelines. |
Smoke, represented by a gray iso surface, penetrates into many occupied areas of a building with a complex atrium The same fire scenario as above, but with a smoke management system that segregates the atrium
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