A model for physics-based fire simulation and analysis

This paper describes the development of a three-dimensional (3D) physics-based fire simulation model that employs the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations to realistically emulate the combustion process. Then, we animate the 3D interactive burning processes by rendering a flame under a set of influence factors and with various solid boundaries and obstacles. It is insufficient to simply create a virtual reality-based fire model. Instead, evaluating the similarity and accuracy of the models requires data processing for the virtual flames. In this paper, detailed data are extracted from the simulation results to compute the fire’s geometrical features and the distribution of the density and velocity fields. Using methods for video-based fire detection, some visual features of the simulated-fire videos are extracted and compared with those of real fires. The results show the capability of the physics-based fire model in representing some features of real flames. The proposed quantitative analysis of virtual flames serves to evaluate the similarity between a virtual and a real fire.