Smoke Field Modeling to Support Damage Control Assessment and Decision-making in Shipboard Environments

In order to support advanced, automated damage control (DC) planning and operations for low manning ship concepts, prognostic modeling of the spread of smoke is needed. Existing models do not address smoke spread and propagation in confined spaces such as onboard ships. The goal of this project is to develop a system that will allow shipboard personnel to make decisions on the importance of immediate response to a potential fire and the subsequent spread of smoke, especially in situations where multiple fires are occurring simultaneously. Based on an assessment of the strengths and limitations of different techniques to predict smoke flow, Combustion Science & Engineering, Inc. proposes to develop a very efficient CFD computational technique to predict smoke spread in Navy ships. The CFD method will utilize a tailored version of the RANS turbulence model, which will be optimized for computational speed to allow for reasonably accurate predictions of smoke spread and real-time utilization of shipboard sensor systems to update and improve the predictions. However, there is a need to develop a new method that significantly reduces processing and estimation times.