The role of numerical modeling in scientific fire investigation

Abstract

Fire risk is perhaps the most common risk in the category of special emergencies, being a phenomenon that affects important areas of economic and social life, such as buildings, industrial facilities, public spaces, forests, crops, or transportation. Scientific investigation of fires is constituted as a set of organized actions, of technical nature, undertaken to determine the causes that led to the occurrence of fires, the source of ignition, and the circumstances that favored the event. Numerical fire modeling is a widely recognized and accepted tool for analysis in fire research. The results of the investigation carried out on-site are compared with the results of fire evolution obtained by computer simulation, using numerical models based on known input data, to verify different hypotheses regarding the cause of the fire. The advantages over experimental methods are expressed by low costs and substantial time savings. Moreover, several simulations can be run simultaneously, for different scenarios of the event or the analysis of different consequences. The paper presents the main advantages that numerical modeling by FDS methods brings in the technical-scientific expertise of fire, with implications in the data analysis, development, and testing of hypotheses, respectively in the selection process of the final hypothesis. words.