Fire & Egress Modeling
Advanced Fire and Egress Modeling
EB Life Safety uses state-of-the-art computational fire and egress modeling tools to evaluate building fire safety. Our engineers use FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator) for fire modeling and Pathfinder for evacuation simulation to quantitatively assess building safety and support performance-based design solutions.
Fire Modeling with FDS
Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model developed by NIST that simulates fire-driven fluid flow. We use FDS to model smoke movement and temperature distributions, evaluate smoke control system performance, determine available safe egress time (ASET), assess fire effects on structural elements, and support performance-based design analyses.
Egress Modeling with Pathfinder
Pathfinder is an agent-based evacuation simulation tool that models occupant movement during emergency evacuations. We use it to calculate required safe egress time (RSET), identify egress bottlenecks and congestion points, evaluate evacuation strategies, optimize exit placement and sizing, and assess evacuation for mobility-impaired occupants.
ASET/RSET Analysis
The fundamental principle of fire safety engineering is that the Available Safe Egress Time (ASET) must exceed the Required Safe Egress Time (RSET). Our modeling combines FDS fire simulation with Pathfinder evacuation modeling to quantitatively demonstrate that occupants can safely evacuate before conditions become untenable.
Applications
Fire and egress modeling is used for performance-based design analyses, smoke control system evaluation, code variance support, complex building geometries, assembly occupancies with large crowds, and high-rise evacuation planning.