Building Fire Safety
BlazeTech has worked on several special challenges in building fire safety. We provide technical solutions to issues in the areas of fire walls, complex CFD analysis using FDS and FLUENT, code-review, performance-based analysis, evacuation modeling, transit systems and chemical industry.
Non-destructive testing of fire walls
BlazeTech has a novel solution to determine fire rating of existing walls that could have changed due a fire event or over long time period. This helps in both conservation of historical structures and cost-effective restoration without compromising safety.
CFD analysis, FDS, and beyond
BlazeTech has tackled challenging scenarios such as gaseous fuel movement in a building using FDS, as well as complicated problems such as reacting flows, two-phase flows of dust or smoke, duct flows, permeating flows such as gas leak using commercial (ANSYS FLUENT) and in-house models (BlazeTank, ADORA and more).
Gas movement from an external pipe leak through ground to entering basement with non-compliant HVAC (top) and compliant HVAC (bottom).
Code Review and Performance-Based Analysis
In spite of the robust NFPA standards and their implementation, there are always new technologies developing and new safety concerns emerge with them. A recent example of this is proliferation of Li-ion batteries. For such scenarios, when the codes and regulation are still catching up, the industry's needs for safety design and risk evaluation is served by detailed analysis and solutions provided by BlazeTech, for example protecting a pack of Li-ion batteries against thermal run-away in energy storage systems and microgrids.
Hazard Analysis for Chemical and Petroleum Industry
We have worked on projects involving oil well fires, unconfined vapor cloud explosion, LNG pool and vapor fires and BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) to mention a few.
Fires in Transit Systems
Fire concerns are particularly severe in a limited access environment such as a high-speed train, new vacuum-tube based transportation systems or tunnels. BlazeTech has worked on several projects in this area including a review of the proposed fire safety practices for the Eurotunnel train and tunnel system and for a major US metropolitan transit authority. We modeled growth of an undercar fire spreading.
Evacuation Modeling
BlazeTech has worked on egress problems from aircraft, subway systems and bus using an in-house model. The model can be customized to special applications such as a hospital, high-rise building, library, zoo, etc.