Lund University, Department of Fire Safety Engineering
Abstract
The open source CFD code FireFOAM has been verified and validated against analytical solution and real fire tests. The verification showed that FireFOAM solves the three modes of heat transfer appropriately. The validation against real fire tests yielded reasonable results. FireFOAM has not been validated for a large set of real fires, which is the case for FDS. Therefore, it is the responsibility of the user to perform the validation, before using the code.One of the advantages of FireFOAM compared to the Fire Dynamic Simulator is that FireFOAM can use unstructured grid.FireFOAM is parallelised and scales reasonable well, but is in general considerably slower in computation speed than the Fire Dynamic Simulator. Further, the software is poorly documented and has a steep learning curve. At present it is more a tool for researchers than for fire consultants
