PRI Dives into Fire & Evacuation Research at FEMTC 2022
West Babylon, NY – Thanks to the growing popularity of virtual meetings and conferences, Giuseppe Valter Diurno, PRI’s Director of Computer Aided Engineering, was able to virtually attend the 2022 Fire and Evacuation Modeling Technical Conference (FEMTC) held in Brno, Czech Republic, September 12-14.
Hosted by ThunderHead Engineering, the FEMTC is a bi-annual event related to fire and evacuation modeling that involves consulting firms, academia, software development teams, research institutions, and local jurisdictions. The aim is to present a wide range of topics for industry and research with case studies, research, experimental and software simulations, reports from real cases, and events in the field related to fire and evacuation.
“In New York City, PRI is involved in various projects for ventilation in subway and city tunnels,” Diurno explained. “To prepare for potential fire events, preliminary simulations that predict fire dynamics and smoke stratifications are most widely used to evaluate the best course of action. Simulations of different scenarios provide data to design and operate active controls of fire and smoke as well as identify evacuation routes. Evacuation methodology in such events is currently one of the most important areas of research not only for fire events, but in case of other catastrophic events that could happen is such structures as well.”
According to Diurno, this conference was particularly interesting because of the participation from many important actors in the field, such as the National Institute of Standard and Technologies (NIST), the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), many academic institutions, and public sector agencies.
Following are Diurno’s key takeaways from the conference presentations:
Fire events in all types of construction can be catastrophic with high tolls in terms of victims and damages. Addressing fire protection and evacuation routes in the design stages of building will considerably mitigate the risks.
Older constructions, particularly in Europe, represent a bigger challenge because of the architectural constraints. However, it is still possible, using preemptive studies and simulations, to mitigate risks and protect people and structures.
The de-facto standards for simulations of fire dynamics and smoke are based on the LES (Large Eddy Simulation) type of computational fluid dynamics codes. The solution of the larger scales of the turbulent flow generated by fire events is of the utmost importance to have sufficiently accurate predictions. NIST’s program FDS is one of the most used, not only because it is freely available, but because of the huge amount of validation cases and the relative ease of use for problems of this type.
Pathfinder from Thunderhead Engineering is the de-facto standard for simulation of people movement combined with 3D animation and the capability to import from architectural files (IFC) to provide realistic representations of this complex event. The software is relatively inexpensive (free for academic institutions), simple to use, and sufficiently open to create behavioral models to simulate crowds’ movement in normal or emergency events.
Public agencies and government institutions provide funding for research and studies of real cases related to catastrophic events that can be caused by the insurgence of fire or explosions, pandemic situations, or social behaviors within exceptional events.
Private companies involved in this type of business are various in type and size - consulting services, system integrators, software development companies, large corporations involved in design and build of large structures (airports, tunnels, stadium, hospitals, etc.).
The public sector involves not only academia and research centers, but also municipalities, ministry, agencies, and governments with involvement at different levels from funding to regulations.
As we have seen in the last few years, global warming has increased the chances of fires in open spaces and changed the dynamics of glaciers and water balances on the planet, including recent draught phenomena that has reduce considerably the availability of water. Attention to these types of events is starting to surface in a couple of presentations and some simulations were presented at the conference.