Parallel Computer Simulation of Fire in Road Tunnel and People Evacuation

Abstract

Advances in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and significant increase of computational power of current computers have led to widespread use of CFD in aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, combustion engineering and other academic disciplines. One of such disciplines is computer modelling and simulation of fire in human structures. Fire is a very complicated and complex phenomenon. Fire research deals with such processes as combustion, radiation, heat transfer, turbulence, fluid dynamics, and other physical and chemical processes. Several advanced fire and smoke simulation systems have been developed to solve various aspects of fire safety in various conditions and environments. In this paper, the use of parallel version of the CFD simulator FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) for the simulation of fire spread and smoke development in a short road tunnel is described. In order to study the impact of the computational domain decomposition on the accuracy and reliability of simulation results, several simulations of a chosen fire scenario ran on the HP blade cluster utilizing different numbers of processors. The obtained parameters of fire and smoke were used to investigate the influence of the fire on people evacuation in the tunnel with active ventilation for a given traffic situation.