Modelisation of the fire facades

Job offer at the CORIA laboratory

Within the framework of a collaborative project funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR FRENETICS), a contractual R&D job is proposed on the modelling of façade fires.

Duration : 18 month

Desired start: January 2022.

Contact details: Alexis Coppalle, [email protected] , 33 (0)6 72 16 33 24

Address : CORIA, UMR6614, Av. de L'Université, 76801 Saint Etienne du Rouvray

Context

Increasing the energy performance of buildings can have consequences for fire safety. The current trend is to increase the insulation of buildings in order to reduce energy wastage. New building products, individually or together, have an impact on fire safety. The insulation market is also growing in the renovation sector. Current and future technical solutions for external facades must offer the highest possible fire safety. Recent dramatic events, especially in London, remind us of the importance of these fire issues.

In France, construction methods are evolving thanks to the current thermal regulations (RT 2020). In this context, external thermal insulation (ETI) has many advantages and has developed strongly. This potentially results in an increase in the mass of fuel on the facades.

For most fire scenarios, one of the weaknesses of the facade response is at the windows, or more generally at the singularities of the insulation panels.

It is therefore important to better characterise and study the ignition and propagation processes on ETI systems and their singularities.

Although the feasibility of the numerical approach has been demonstrated, the necessary tools are not sufficiently developed. The FRENETICS project aims to acquire the scientific and technical knowledge necessary to control the fire safety of facades and to strengthen the research of new low-flammability materials. Using both experimental methods and CFD simulations, studies will be carried out at several scales, small (material), intermediate (panel) and large (system). The objective is to characterise the thermal decomposition, to evaluate the reaction to fire, to validate flame propagation models with a multi-scale approach, to characterise the flame-façade interactions and finally to analyse the reaction to fire of realistic façade configurations. This project brings together four partners, the CORIA (Rouen), P-PRIME (Poitiers) and UMET (Lille) laboratories and an industrial partner Efectis.

Job profile

The activity will be mainly devoted to the simulation and modelling of fire propagation on a façade with the tools available on the openFoam/fireFoam platform. With this platform, it will be possible to simulate the essential physical and chemical phenomena responsible for the propagation of flames on a solid material, namely the flow of gases along a heated wall, the degradation of solid materials under the effect of heat and thermal radiation. First, the limits of the available tools will be tested by simulating simple cases on a laboratory scale. Then the validity of the models will be analysed with more realistic cases, in particular with LEPIR2 test results. On the basis of these comparisons, model improvements will be proposed and tested.

Within the framework of this collaborative project, the person recruited will also be required to participate in the tests carried out by the partners, in order to collect and analyse the data necessary for the simulations.

Candidate profile: The candidate should have completed a PhD in fluid mechanics or combustion and be familiar with CFD tools. Experience with simulation tools using the openFoam platform is a plus. Knowledge of the C++ language is not required but desirable.