Validation and Verification of Fire Models for Fire Safety Engineering

The move towards fire performance-based design in building and transport regulations has led to an increased use of fire models. This increased use of these models and the evolution of different regulations have put higher demands on the predictive capability of fire models. The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of different activities relating to the validation and verification of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models for fire safety engineering purposes and how they relate to other areas of CFD calculations. Greater focus has been put on Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) as it is the tool mostly used in the fire safety engineering community in Sweden. It can be concluded that a number of excellent activities have been conducted over the past decades but that more work can be done in order to obtain overall uncertainties and error estimates of fire models used within a performance-based design in a similar way to that used in other disciplines. As a fire performance-based design contains different steps, not only fire modeling, it is clear that a lack of overall determination of uncertainty and error estimate for the complete performance-based design process exists. Therefore more information is needed on uncertainties in the process of determining the fire scenarios and design fires for other types of models using the input of fire models (egress models, structural stability, etc.) all depending on the type of functional criteria chosen for the design. Education in the area of validation and verification is also an important issue to be tackled in the future so that the fire safety engineer can obtain good knowledge in determining the appropriateness of the fire model for their specific project.