COUPLED SIMULATION FOR FIRE-EXPOSED STRUCTURES USING CFD AND THERMO-MECHANICAL MODELS

Abstract

Fire resistance of buildings is based on fire tests in furnaces with gas burners. However, the tests are very expensive and time consuming. This article presents a coupled simulation of an element loaded by a force and a fire loading. The simulation solves a weakly-coupled problem, consisting of fluid dynamics, heat transfer and mechanical model. The temperature field from the computational fluid dynamics simulation (CFD) creates Cauchy and radiative boundary conditions for the thermal model. Then, the temperature field from element is passed to the mechanical model, which induces thermal strain and modifies material parameters. The fluid dynamics is computed with Fire Dynamics Simulator and the thermo-mechanical task is solved in OOFEM. Both softwares are interconnected with MuPIF python library, which allows smooth data transfer across the different meshes, orchestrating simulations in particular codes, exporting results to the VTK formats and distributed computing.