Title: Overview Of Enclosure Fire Dynamics And Computer Modelling
Speaker: Dr. Bjorn Karlsson
From: Iceland Construction Authority (ICA)
Date: Oct. 20, 2015 09:30-11:30
CV of the Speaker:
In 2006 he was also appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering, University of Iceland. In 2011 Bjorn became the Director General of the newly formed Iceland Construction Authority. The authority is responsible for electrical safety, fire safety and building regulations in Iceland and is in charge of the Fire Services College, a school for fire fighters and fire officers. A new responsibility is risk analysis and response to hazards due to oil exploration in the ocean between Iceland and Jan Mayen.
Bjorn has written a number of books and many scientific papers in the field of fire safety and risk engineering, one of his best known works is the textbook “Enclosure Fire Dynamics”, written together with Prof. Jim Quintiere and published by CRC Press. He has given numerous presentations at international seminars in Europe, USA, Canada, Japan, China and Australia. He sits on the board of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS), has served as Chairman of the IAFSS Education subcommittee, is on the editorial board of Fire Technology and on the editorial board of the International Journal on
Engineering Performance-Based Fire Codes.
Abstract:
Dr. Bjorn Karlsson works as Director General, Iceland Construction Authority, he is the Fire Marshal of Iceland and Associate Professor, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Iceland.Bjorn graduated in Civil Engineering from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh 1985. He moved to Lund in Sweden and received a Ph.D degree in Fire Safety and Risk Engineering from Lund University in 1992, where he worked as Associate Professor from 1993 to 2001. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, USA, 1996. He became Fire Marshal and Director General of the state run Iceland Fire Authority, Reykjavik, Iceland in 2001.
The lecture consists of two parts. In the first part of “Overview of Enclosure Fire Dynamics”, the lecture starts with a review of the state of Fire Safety Engineering and then goes through description of an enclosure fire, including heat release rates, plume flows, vent flows, gas temperatures, smoke filling, and computer programs for simulating enclosure fires. This parts is a very quick overview of book "Enclosure Fire Dynamics" by Dr. Bjorn Karlsson and Prof. Jim Quintiere. Power points are available for distribution.
The second part of the lecture is concerned with Computer Modeling of Fire. This part will aim at introducing best practices on how fire models should be used and how output from such models should be interpreted and checked for reliability. The lecture starts with some background on the basics, such as heat release rates, plumes, gas temperatures and smoke filling, goes through the basics of fire simulation models, gives specific examples of two such models; CFAST (a two zone model) and FDS (a Computational Fluid Dynamics model) and discusses how heat release rate, smoke potential, calculation domain, grid size and other input should be chosen to maximize the probability of a reliable result. Some recent literature on the topic will be presented.
