Developing Probabilistic Design Fires for Performance-based Fire Safety Engineering

Research is ongoing in New Zealand to develop a new risk-informed fire safety design tool called B-RISK that is a combination of deterministic and probabilistic calculation functionality. The purpose of the tool is so that users can examine the risk and uncertainty that is part of modeling building fires in a rational and systematic fashion. A specific module in B-RISK that generates design fire inputs for iterative B-RISK simulations is described in the paper, and statistical distributions for the fire growth rate and peak heat release rate are developed for a residential-scale building occupancy. The use of this statistical data within B-RISK is also demonstrated and comparisons drawn with new building code compliance provisions that have recently come into effect in New Zealand.© 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the Asia-Oceania Association for Fire Science and Technology.