Fire engineering tools used in consequence analysis

The introduction of Regulation 17 to the new revised Chapter II-2 of the SOLAS convention, 1974, is evidence of the shift from the current prescriptive-based approach for assessing fire safety design of ships to the state-of-the-art performance-based approach that could accommodate the full advantages of scientific and technological development and allows for innovation to take place. The utilisation of the new approach requires the existence of fire engineering tools to perform consequence analysis, which is the core of the risk analysis technique. Most of these tools have been developed for simulating fire and smoke propagation in civil building compartments, and there is a doubt that these models are applicable for simulating compartment fires aboard ships. The work presented in this paper evaluates the current available fire modelling tools through a series of comprehensive comparisons between representative zone models and a benchmark field model in fire scenarios that involve typical ship layouts.