TY - THES ID - 137546687 TI - Exploratory study of the temporal evolution of pressure due to fire in enclosures relevant for the nuclear industry by means of zone models AU - Ivens, Dylan AU - Merci, Bart AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen. Opleiding Master of Safety Engineering (Leuven) PY - 2021 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Ingenieurswetenschappen DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:137546687 AB - Both for industrial and private buildings insulation is an important factor. Insulation will be described by the airtightness of the compartment and the boundary condition insulation used. Insulation and airtightness are important to residential buildings because of the need to be energy efficient. This is for economic and ecological reasons. Like the residential reasoning, the industry can benefit from high insulation grades and airtightness of compartments. For example; the nuclear industry. It is clear to see when working with radioactive substances, these substances need to be contained. Airtightness and insulation will be parts of this containment plan. Airtightness and high insulation grades also have a disadvantage relevant to safety. Fire in airtight and well-insulated compartments results in increased compartment pressures due to the release of hot combustion gasses of the fire. This results in safety hazards. Due to high peak values for positive and negative pressures, structures can be permanently damaged leading to possible collapses. Another hazard is entrapment of people in compartments due to increased compartment pressure. Increased compartment pressure will prevent a door from being opened, as little as 100-200Pa pressure difference could be enough to hinder evacuation. When being entrapped, not only the possibility of a building collapse is imminent, but also the heat and intoxication are hazardous to people. Being able to realistically assess what is going on in a compartment during a fire is key in keeping people safe in and around the impacted compartments. Knowledge of what is going on inside a compartment is key to being able to mitigate the outcome of such an accident. Researching or investigating a fire and its impact on the pressure, temperature and other variables in a compartment can be achieved by using zone modelling tools. In this thesis two tools are used called CFAST and Fortran. CFAST or ‘Consolidated Fire And Smoke Transport model’ is a program created by NIST or the ‘National Institute of Standards and Technology’. Fortran is a coding language. A basic zone modelling code is written using the formulas found in report. The Fortran code is created and discussed in thesis [2]. The Fortran code is a more basic version of the CFAST zone modelling program. A comparison is performed between the two zone modelling tools in this thesis. Experiments performed and documented in publication [1] are used to compare the two tools. The experiments describe a fire in a well-confined room, an admission and an extraction fan are mounted to the compartment ceiling. A propane burner is used as a fire load. The compartment and ducting have several measuring devices installed for data acquisition. First the Fortran code is extensively verified because of missing information in the original text. This is called ‘functional testing’ (see chapter 3). After that, the CFAST program is installed and this installation is verified. Chapters 4.5 until 4.7.3 describe the comparison between the two zone modelling tools. During the comparison several findings were observed and highlighted. These findings are summarised in the conclusion in the form of advantages, disadvantages and improvement suggestions (see chapter 5). The thesis is ended by describing some future work suggestions and final thoughts. This is very important because this thesis documents how to simulate using both tools and what the pitfalls or differences are. ER -