Stochastic CFD Fire Modeling of Military Shelters

Fire can act extremely quickly. In as little as 60 seconds a tent can be destroyed by fire, requiring very quick soldier reaction time to even survive. Improving fire safety begins with understanding the fire dynamics associated with each system. All current military shelters are evaluated for fire safety on a component basis only; there are no specifications for how the overall system design relates to generation of flame, heat, and smoke. As such, the Army needs a three-dimensional, reliable and validated fire model to simulate system-level shelter fire scenarios. The needed model will provide the Army with an effective, inexpensive method to perform iterative design, material, or configuration changes to any shelter design at low cost, avoiding the time and monetary investment in destructive live-fire testing. ADA Technologies proposes to leverage the extensive work done to develop FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) and modify its solver to a stochastic one, called MC-FDS. In Phase I, ADA will develop an initial version of MC-FDS, and use it to perform modeling of corresponding small-scale experiments similar to ASTM D6413 using cotton sateen and PVC-coated polyester. Side-by-side comparison of the model output and tests will demonstrate the capabilities and promise of MC-FDS.