Issues in Numerical Simulation of Fire Suppression

This paper outlines general physical and computational issues associated with performing numerical simulation of fire suppression. Fire suppression encompasses a broad range of chemistry and physics over a large range of time and length scales. The authors discuss the dominant physical/chemical processes important to fire suppression that must be captured by a fire suppression model to be of engineering usefulness. First-principles solutions are not possible due to computational limitations, even with the new generation of tera-flop computers. A basic strategy combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation techniques with sub-grid model approximations for processes that have length scales unresolvable by gridding is presented