Fires are generally unwanted and unforeseen events which can turn out very harmful against people’s safety and property. Every aspects of human activities need to face such kind of phenomena in terms of prevention and/or mitigation: from industry (Oil&Gas, Power Generation, …) to transport mass systems (metros, ships, …), to civil structures (stations, airports, hospitals, …) also, or especially, for entertainment (discos, cinemas, …). In order to manage such kind of issues, each Country provided itself of rules which generally allow both prescriptive and performance-based approaches.
The benefits of performance-based approaches are emphasized within a multidisciplinary fire protection design: system engineering, CAE, testing&validation, standards compliance etc.. Numerical analyses according to standards could be challenging due to the complexity of the physics itself and the lack of information on materials’ behaviour under fire aggression, therefore Engin@Fire is developing a CFD-FEM coupling methodology for fire damages analyses (e.g. flame penetration tests) in which a specific geometry discretization is implemented (overcoming the limits of the Cartesian mesh modelling), allowing to reproduce even complex geometric entities. The main purpose of this activity is to support a multi-scale approach in the characterization of materials and structural components fire behaviour. Coupled numerical analyses improve the reliability of performance-based approaches on the basis of which the entire design chain can be upgraded.