Visibility in Compartment Fires
In life safety analysis, the simulation of smoke propagation, toxicity and visibility can be used to predict the tenability criteria during evacuation.
The modelling of fire and smoke spread in buildings using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods became very popular in fire safety engineering and science. Increasingly accurate geometry and phenomena modeling are the benefits of those methods, however they are in general numerically and computationally very demanding. Three dimensional turbulent reactive flows with radiative, convective and conductive heat transfer have to be modeled on length scales ranging from less than one millimetre to several hundred metres: The use of high performance computing (HPC) suggests itself.
The fire dynamics group emerged 2012 within the division "Civil Safety and Traffic" of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The division is closely coupled to the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, where the group contributes to various teaching activities and supervision of Bachelor, Master and PhD students. The primary scientific goal of the group is the development and validation of models and methods in the field of fire dynamics.
All our work, i.e. methods, software and data sets, is freely available either directly via the webpages or on request.
We are closely cooperating with the chair Computational Civil Engineering at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal – some of the team members are working at both locations.
Research Topics:
Last Modified: 18.02.2026