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Fire Engineering

Comparison of FED CO Results – FDS Devices & Pathfinder Agents

This blog compares the FED CO results generated using FDS devices with results generated using a Pathfinder agent. FDS Model A simple FDS model contains a fire source and two openings. Devices are placed at 1.75 m above the floor level near the vertical opening to measure the CO concentration in the air. Pyrosim Model […]

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Fire Engineering

Fractional Effective Dose – Carbon Monoxide

Fire safety engineers recognize that low visibility does not result in incapacitation or death. However, low visibility creates a challenging environment for occupants to find and navigate the escape route, resulting in extended egress time and extended exposure to harmful combustion products. Inhalation of toxic combustion gases is the most common cause of death in […]

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Fire Engineering

Introducing Sprinkler Activation Time Calculator

Introduction In this post, I would like to introduce a program developed by Jim Burns, Fire Investigator at Regina Fire and Protective Service, Canada, to calculate sprinkler activation time. He is also a contributor at  kilolimacode.com, a professional community providing Canadian building and fire code information. Recently, I published a Python script to calculate the […]

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Fire Engineering

Radiant Heat Transfer & Tenability Criteria

Heat transfers from a body with a high temperature to a body with a lower temperature. When heat transfer occurs between bodies that are not in direct physical contact with each other or separated in space, the phenomenon is called heat radiation. Unlike conduction and convection, heat transfer by thermal radiation does not necessarily need […]

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Fire Engineering

Determining sprinkler activation time using Alpert’s correlations

While designing fire safety systems, a fire engineer needs to determine the expected fire size based on the project details. In Australia, Alpert’s correlation and Heskestad equations are typically used to determine the fire size at which a sprinkler head activates. In this blog, I have written a Python script to calculate the time and […]

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Fire Engineering

Python scripts for radiation calculations

Thermal radiation is a distinct mechanism of heat transfer that allows spatially separated objects at different temperatures to transfer heat.  Radiative Emissive Power According to the Stefan-Boltzmann equation, the total energy emitted by a body is proportional to T⁴, where T is the temperature in Kelvin. The total emissive power is expressed as: Where σ is […]

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Fire Engineering

Real-Time Animation of HRR Graph using FuncAnimation in Matplotlib

1.1. Real-Time Animation of Graphs Real-time graphs are helpful when you need to visualise values from sensors or databases in real-time. This serves an important function in many critical industries where continuous monitoring of data is required, e.g. monitoring ground movement, emission control in tunnel environment, stock market etc. This article goes through the Python […]

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Fire Engineering

Locating all the Fire & Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW) fire stations on a map

This article will look at how to extract fire location-specific information from the Fire and Rescue New South Wales (FRNSW) website using the BeautifulSoup package. The data extracted is used to generate a map with all the station locations on an HTML page. Map of all fire station locations is here: https://jabirjamal.com/frnsw-stations/ You can also check […]

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Fire Engineering

Generating Graphs Using Device Data from FDS

Introduction This week’s article will look at python scripts to generate graphs to measure the total exhaust rate provided in a compartment and gas temperature measured at discrete locations in FDS models. For this task, I have created two models in FDS: Model 1: Containing only volume flow devices Model 2: Containing volume flow and […]

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Fire Engineering

Generating Heat Release Rate Graph Using Python Script

Introduction One of the simple mistakes I have made in fire modelling is specifying the wrong Heat Release Rate (HRR). This mistake is often realised when results are post-processed at the end of the simulation resulting in wasted days and weeks of simulation. Although this mistake can be avoided easily by verifying the input parameters […]