Fire growth simulation in passenger rail vehicles using a simplified flame spread model for integration with CFD analysis

Few robust engineering approaches currently exist to assess flame spread performance of interior finish materials for a range of source fires, in support of compartment fire hazard analysis. As a step toward closing this gap, a simplified approach for assessing (a) the propensity for a material to support self-propagating flame spread and (b) the extent of flame spread for a range of source fire conditions has been developed. In addition, a general approach for integrating the output of the simplified flame spread analysis into a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model has been developed to predict the overall fire growth and spread hazard for a passenger rail vehicle compartment.