Import Fire and Smoke Slices into Evacuation Results

Fire protection engineers, also referred to as fire safety engineers, have a fundamental responsibility to compare tenability time vs. egress time. Tenability time refers to the duration between initial combustion and the point at which smoke reaches life threatening thickness. Fire simulations performed with PyroSim and FDS help evaluate tenability properties such as visibility, CO mixture fraction, and temperature.

Slices are results recordings that capture user-defined planar slices of information. This allows the user to spend minimal processing time recording important areas of analysis. One example is to record smoke visibility at an average head height within the room. During configuration, the plane is defined by the position on one of three axes and the desired property to capture as seen in Figure 1. *.smv files will then automatically be generated with the appropriate values recorded.

To add FDS Slice visualizations to your results, select Analysis » Load FDS Results… from the 3D results viewer to open the file selection dialog box. Choose the appropriate *.smv file that you would like to import, and you will then see the various Slices populated in the left-hand tree view. Slices are separated by the property that they display. One or many Slices of the same property can be displayed simultaneously, as seen in Figure 2. Double click or right-click and select “Show” on a particular Slice to display it. It will immediately be viewable in the 3D results and synchronized with the initial time of the Pathfinder results. The legend automatically scales for the values recorded in the Slice with a color map.

By combining tenability and egress simulations, fire protection engineers can create synchronized analyses of heat/smoke proliferation and pedestrian position. This allows for more thorough investigation into the smoke conditions as they pertain to evacuees. This feature has been made available as of Pathfinder 2014.3.1016.