Towards real-time fire data synthesis using numerical simulations

Synthesising data from fire scenarios using fire simulations requires iterative running of these simulations. For real-time synthesising, faster-than-real-time simulations are thus necessary. In this article, different model types are assessed according to their complexity to determine the trade-off between the accuracy of the output and the required computing time. A threshold grid size for real-time computational fluid dynamic simulations is identified, and the implications of simplifying existing field fire models by turning off sub-models are assessed. In addition, a temperature correction for two zone models based on the conservation of energy of the hot layer is introduced, to account for spatial variations of temperature in the near field of the fire. The main conclusions are that real-time fire simulations with spatial resolution are possible and that it is not necessary to solve all fine-scale physics to reproduce temperature measurements accurately. There remains, however, a gap in performance between computational fluid dynamic models and zone models that must be explored to achieve faster-than-real-time fire simulations.