TABLE OF CONTENTS Geoff Cox and Suresh Kumar
Geoff Cox is technical director of the U.K. Fire Research Station where he has been conducting research since 1973. He is visiting professor at Cranfield University and chairman of the International Standards Technical Committee on Fire Safety.
Dr. Suresh Kumar joined the U.K. Fire Research Station in 1980, and heads the CFD fire-modeling team. His major research interests are in fire science, fire modeling, and fire safety engineering. He has pioneered the development of the CFD models JASMINE and TUN-FIRE for fire safety design and hazard assessment.
It was in the early 1920s, that Lewis Richardson first demonstrated the feasibility of solving, using numerical methods, the governing equations of fluid flow. [1] His purpose was weather prediction, but it was not for another 50 years that the technology we now know as computational fluid dynamics (or CFD) began to emerge as a general tool for the analysis of the full breadth of fluid flow problems, including those associated with fire.
Solution of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations using numerical simulation tools has now become commonplace in the design and analysis of many practical engineering problems. This advance has been driven by the availability of commercial CFD software together with massive increases in computer speed accompanied by ever-reducing hardware costs.
This technology evolved outside the fire community and has been imported into it, in contrast to zonal models (Section 3, Chapter 7), which were developed within this discipline. This has far-reaching implications...
