What we do
Laboratory of Fire Engineering focuses mainly on mathematical modeling of fire, thermal decomposition of solid materials (pyrolysis), and experimental measurements of material properties during fire. Our work finds direct applications in fire and safety engineering.
Which tools do we use?
We use mathematical models based on CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) method.
- Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) - software specialized in fire modeling.
- Ansys Fluent, Ansys CFX - general commercial software for liquid flow modeling.
- Python - universal open-source programming language.
Modeling alone is not enough, where do we get experimental data?
- We conduct small scale fire experiments of solid and liquid fuels at our laboratory.
- We have our own photogrammetric apparatus for measuring bulk density of chars.
- We cooperate with Technical Institute of Fire Protection in Prague, where students can, by arrangement, use the laboratory’s experimental facilities, and which provides us with valuable data from large-scale fire tests.
Prevention
- Location of fire safety features in buildings and industrial technologies (detectors, nozzles of stable fire extinguishing equipment).
- Firefighter safety - planning fire tests and drills, development of methodological guidelines.
- Fire safety of electric and CNG vehicles.
- Planning and verifying the functionality of evacuation strategies.
Investigation
- Cause and spread of fire.
- Verification of hypotheses about the type and amount of flammable fuel.
CFD simulations research
- Models of solids thermal decomposition.
- Measuring input material properties for flame spread modelling.
- Radiation and soot modelling.
- Volatile liquid fuels evaporation models.
- Water mist extinguishing multiphase models.
- Validation and verification of CFD solvers.
