Understanding fire and smoke flow through modeling and visualization

Computer modeling and visualization are important tools for understanding the processes of fire behavior. Fire models range in complexity from simple correlations for predicting quantities such as flame heights or flow velocities to moderately complex zone fire models for predicting time-dependent smoke layer temperatures and heights. Zone fire model calculations can run on today's computers within minutes because they solve only four differential equations per room. Zone models approximate the entire upper layer with just one temperature. This approximation works remarkably well but breaks down for complicated flows or geometries. For such cases, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are required.