External Fire Impacts on the Interior Temperature of a Building

Abstract

Facility siting studies are an important part of process safety, and are required for facilities that fall under OSHA’s PSM program. Facility siting is frequently interpreted as performing a building siting study which adheres to the guidance given in API RP 752. The guidance recommends that all occupied buildings be evaluated for fire impacts. Both jet fires and pool fires can create a significant thermal radiative flux on buildings and are routinely evaluated in siting studies. Buildings that may be impacted by thermal fluxes exceeding threshold values often require an advanced analysis, especially when a non-flammable building may experience a high flux for a short duration. For these scenarios, the interior temperature rise, rather than structural impacts, may be the dominant occupant threat. This paper explores the impacts of an external fire on the interior temperature of a building. The Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, is applied to this scenario.