PhD Thesis - staffweb - University of Greenwich

APPENDIX 3 : Conference Paper "The Development and Application of Group Solversin the SMARTFIRE Fire Field Model", Ewer J., Galea E., Patel M. and Knight B.,Proceedings of Interflam '99, Edinburgh, UK, 1999, Vol. 2, pp 939-950.Previous research on group solver technology focussed on static group membership in atwo-dimensional application [2]. In the remainder of this paper, the SMARTFIRE softwarewill be briefly described followed by a detailed description of the group solver technique.The technique will then be demonstrated for both static and dynamic group membershipthrough the use of a simple three-dimensional fire application.THE SMARTFIRE FIRE FIELD MODELSMARTFIRE is an open architecture CFD environment with an integrated knowledge basedsystem that attempts to make fire field modelling accessible to non-experts in CFD. Thereare three major components to the software: CFD code, User Interfaces, and Expert System.By embedding expert knowledge into the CFD software, it is hoped that fire field modellingis made more accessible to the fire engineer with limited CFD expertise. The expertisecurrently embedded within the code is used to support the critical task of mesh specificationof fire field simulation scenarios. Expertise is also being developed for the optimalautomated dynamic solution control of fire field simulations during the solution process [3].The software is fully developed by the University of Greenwich using a combination of inhouseand proprietary software building blocks. It is designed to run on PC's under theWIN95/98 or NT operating systems. The minimum computer platform required is a PentiumPC with 32 Mbytes of memory. The primary components of the software have beendescribed previously [2-5] and so will not be repeated here. However, as this paperconcentrates on the CFD engine, this will be briefly outlined here. Figure 1 shows theconceptual architecture of the software and its modules.FIGURE 1: The modular architecture of SMARTFIRE.Appendix 11.3 Page 143-2 2