Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

There is considerable interest in modeling the growth of fires and the spread of toxic gases in multi-compartment structures. Much of the attention is focused on the development of numerical models which are fast and robust, but able to make reasonably accurate predictions from the onset of ignition. We have constructed such a model (FAST) and performed a series of validation experiments to test it. This paper is a discussion of some of the improvements which have been made to physical algorithms and underlying numerical basis of the model, a description of some of the experiments used to verify the refined model, and of some additions which we intend to incorporate.