This book is intended for professional readers.

Welcome to the Fire Simulation for Engineers manual at Wikibooks, a basic guide to fire simulation for engineering applications using free and open source tools (eg. CFAST, FDS, Smokeview, BlenderFDS).

Preface

This manual was born as a small tutorial for students of fire safety engineering courses. Then it grew to the current state.

The main goal of this manual is to introduce the engineer to the complex world of fire simulation, and complements the official documentation of the referred simulation tools. The official documentation for these tools was released in the public domain and remains an invaluable source of reference for advanced users. This manual is heavily based on that official documentation, some large parts of this manual are even copy-pasted and adapted from the official documentation.

In this manual, topics are organized in a strict logical order and the basics are thoroughly explained to improve the learning curve. Some advanced topics are completely omitted for the sake of simplicity. According to teaching experience, students understand the logic behind the fire simulation tools and become autonomous learners after 36 hours of course: they learn to work independently and are able to develop reasonable engineering level applications by themselves.

This manual is not intended to cover research applications for fire simulation.