An Experimental and Numerical Study on Fire Spread in a Furnished Room

The main objective of this research was to examine the development of fire in a furnished room in a typical high-rise building. This work was part of research on the fire safety of building occupants. It included two controlled fires in which a standard sofa in a room was set on fire. Several thermocouple trees were arranged in the test room and the temperature was continuously recorded. Additionally, each fire test was videotaped for further analysis. Since an unexpected forepeak of the temperature course was observed, special attention was paid to explain this phenomenon. For this purpose, numerical models of fire development in a furnished room were built using the well-recognized software package, ANSYS Fluent and Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS). The numerical research was focused on fire spread over a single piece of furniture, the sofa. The data recorded in real experiments were used to tune and validate the numerical models. The results of the Fluent numerical simulation were consistent with the recorded experimental data and proved that after the initial growth, there was a critical phase of fire development in which the fire might almost snuff or flare again. Meanwhile, the FDS results, despite being generally in accordance with the experiment, did not reproduce this critical phase of fire spreading.