An evaluation of two methods to predict temperatures in multi-room compartment fires

• Two methods for calculating fire conditions in a two-room compartment are presented.
• Experimental data on a two-room compartment fire scenario is presented.
• A detailed estimation of the experimental uncertainty is presented.
• The two methods are evaluated against the experimental data.

The objective of this paper is to compare predictions with two hand-calculation methods with data from a small-scale two-room compartment fire experiment including 52 individual tests. The first method is based on two previously presented empirical models, and the second method consists of several calculation steps in order to solve a simple energy balance. The second method is based on the conservation of energy and mass and it performs as a simple two-zone model that can be used to get an estimate of the gas mass flow, hot-gas-layer temperature and interface height in the fire room and adjacent rooms.An experimental setup consisting of two small rooms connected with an opening has been used to gather experimental data. The size of the rooms, openings and fire source were varied in the experiment, which resulted in 16 unique experimental tests and each test was repeated at least three times.A majority of the temperature predictions in the fire room with the two hand-calculations methods were within the bounds of the experimental uncertainty, and the predictions in the adjacent room had a similar accuracy. The hot-gas-layer interface height predictions, which were calculated with second method, were overall within the experimental uncertainty.