Fire can act extremely quickly in military shelters. Improving fire safety begins with understanding the fire dynamics associated with each system. All current shelters are evaluated for fire safety on a component basis only; there are no specifications for how the overall system design relates to generation of flame, heat, and smoke. As such, the Army needs a three-dimensional, reliable and validated fire model to simulate system-level shelter fire scenarios. The needed model will provide the Army with an effective, inexpensive method to perform iterative design, material, or configuration changes to any shelter design at low cost, avoiding the time and monetary investment in destructive live-fire testing. In Phase I, ADA developed an initial version of MC-FDS and used it to perform modeling of small-scale experiments using canvas, polyester and a rigid composite material. In Phase II, ADA proposes to expand the work to intermediate and full-scale shelter model validation using a stochastic approach. Fire tests and material flammability studies will be conducted in collaboration with WPI and Reax Engineering. The experimental work will enable critical improvements to the modeling of real-world military shelter fires. The stochastic framework will provide baseline and worst-case scenario analysis for various types of shelters.
