5. Transferring knowledge to the fire situation

5.1 Global fire development models

Codes for calculating the development of a fire in a dwelling or a building open to the public aim to calculate the evolution over time of the main variables: temperatures, gas velocities, heat flows, gas and soot concentrations...

Two strategies have been adopted for the development of these codes:

• zone models are based on a breakdown of the room (or rooms) into domains that exchange energy and matter with each other. In each zone, the evolution of variables is calculated by solving balance equations;

• field models, which divide up the room into a three-dimensional mesh and solve the differential equations for the conservation of mass, momentum,...