Modelling of fire spread in car parks

Leander Noordijk and Tony Lemaire
TNO Centre for Fire Research, Delft, the Netherlands

Currently, design codes assume that in a car park fire at most 3-4 vehicles are on fire at the same time. Recent incidents in car parks have drawn international attention to such assumptions and have raised questions as to the fire spreading mechanism and the resulting fire load on the structure. E.g. a recent fire at Schiphol Airport showed a much faster fire spread and a larger number of vehicles on fire at the same time than was normally assumed. To understand and predict the fire spread in a car park a, for the time being deterministic, model is being developed based on the effects of the governing radiative heat transfer. With this model it will also be possible to quantify the effects of different relevant parameters.

Key words: Fire spread, car park, radiation