Numerical Investigations of a Large Fire Exposure Crib Test—Presenting Different Pyrolysis Modelling Methodologies and Numerical Results

The need for numerical-based approaches to investigate the fire behaviour in buildings with combustible components is growing due to the increasing use of timber by the construction industry to meet the ‘Climate Action Plan 2050’. This requires consideration of the complex kinetic processes that take place during the burning of the wood in the numerical models. This is accomplished by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to numerically model the material pyrolysis and combustion processes. This article presents three different approaches for simulating the behaviour of a wood crib fire using the fire dynamics simulator (FDS). These approaches are based on either prescribing the burning rate of the wood directly from the physical experiments or using the kinetic parameters to govern the underlying processes, such as pyrolysis. Wooden crib fire experiments carried out by the RISE Research Institute in Sweden inside the combustion chamber that were used to validate all the methods. The numerical results from the method, that utilised the experimentally determined burning rate, were in good agreement with the experimental results, with a maximum deviation of 6% in the case of HRR. On the other hand, the model that needs kinetic parameters as its input has shown maximum discrepancies of 12% and 33% compared to experimental results. These methods are sensitive to the input parameters and the extent of dependency needs further investigation.