Development of a Coupled CFD-FEA Model for Whole Building Fire Performance Determination

The output of this project will be new methods in full building fire performance modelling. Fire safety is a critical aspect of building performance and the products and systems that are used in construction are subject to tightly controlled standards that are specified in the Building Regulations. All construction products require a European reaction to fire classification that is based on their performance in small-scale fire tests. Despite the critical importance of fire performance, computational modelling capability within industry in this field is extremely limited and rather restricted in scope. Currently, only infrequent, small-scale thermomechanical Finite Element Analysis (FEA) are generally used to predict the likely performance of building components at elevated temperature. Regulatory requirements often focus primarily on life safety and have given rise to a number of small-scale 'reaction to fire tests'. These tests, which look purely at the performance of products in isolation, are the primary source of data for FEA models. Crucially these tests do not account for the performance of whole buildings. Therefore we currently do not fully understand how new building materials will behave in a building without performing expensive full building physical experiments. For example, following the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017, the Building Regulations in England have been amended to include a ban on the use of combustible materials above 18m in high-rise residential buildings. There are those in government and the insurance sector who advocate that the ban should be further extended to heights of less than 18m and to include non-residential buildings. This would have a severe effect on certain manufacturing industries in the UK if enacted. Full building fire performance modelling would enable policy makers to make these sorts of decisions based on evidence.

The objectives of this project are:

To extend current, in-house, product/system modelling capability to whole building fire performance modelling by combining CFD and FEA methodologies.

To generate a modelling method/framework that can be adopted to create fully coupled CFD-FEA models for a range of building types.

To compare, at a variety of fire loadings, the likely fire propagation within a warehouse building clad with foam-filled sandwich panels with the fire propagation in a warehouse of similar design that utilises mineral wool-based built-up systems and/or panels.

To compare the likely fire performance of panel products containing possible alternative foam materials with the performance of current products.

To investigate the fire performance of larger assemblies and sub-assemblies of composite panels used in conjunction with other materials.