Fire zone/field model performance based investigation in fire flashover phenomenon

Flashover is a crucial phenomenon in which all indoor combustibles ignite nearly simultaneously in building fires. Flashover prediction and understanding are vital in building fire protection engineering. Current fire simulation software is unable to accurately estimate the flashover-induced time. This study developed an improved mathematical zone model for analyzing flashover during a building fire with crucial parameters, including heat release rate, wall thermal inertia, and smoke layer height, which was combined with FDS (Fire Dynamic Simulator) field model software to analyze a park lodging bedroom fire experiment from the NIST (National Institute of Standard Technology). The effects of fire intensity and heat pyrolysis for burning objects on the fire characteristics were studied and used to predict the flashover-induced time.