Simulation of fire spread between residential buildings regarding safe separation distance

Abstract

Determination of optimal safe distance between buildings is a task of many safety and economic analyses. Generally, it is known that increasing separation distance increases fire protection of an adjacent building, but decreases the cost effectiveness of urban solutions. For this reason, CFD Large Eddy Simulation method of Fire Dynamics Simulator software package has been used in this paper to determine optimal separation distance required for preventing fire spread between two residential buildings facing each other. The minimum conditions necessary for ignition of the window curtains in the fire-exposed building located at different building distances (3,5 m, 4,0 m and 4,5 m) were analysed. The obtained results show that the fire does not spread at the distance of 4,5 m, and that the incident heat flux at the curtain surface is higher than the critical heat flux value of 12,6 kW/m2 adopted in many building codes.

Keywords

• fire spread
• LES method
• residential building
• separation distance