EMVANEMED – A methodology to compare and evaluate numerical results with experimental data, application to OECD PRISME DOORtest PRS_DI_D3

 The main objective of the international OECDPRISME Project [1] is the analysis of the spread of heat and smoke from a fire compartment via different transmission paths (doors, leakages, external and internal ventilation ducts) to one or multiple target rooms. Furthermore, the project shall help to investigate the impact of a fire event onsafety related nuclear power plant systems and equipment such as cables. This is done by performing several large scale fire test series in the DIVA facility of the Institute de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire (IRSN) in Cadarache (France).

The first test series PRISME-DOOR focuses on the spread of heat and smoke through doorways to one or two target rooms by varying both the size of the liquid pool fire used in the experiments and the air exchange rate of the mechanically ventilated compartments.

The Institute of Building Materials, Concrete Construction and Fire Protection (iBMB) of the Braunschweig University of Technology) carried out several so-called “blind”(without any knowledge on the experimental results) and “open” fire simulations of the experiment PRS_DI_D3 of this series to validate the CFD fire simulation code “Fire Dynamics Simulator” (FDS), Version 4 [2]. In this context, a methodology called “EMVANEMED” has been developed to compare and evaluate the numerical results gained from the simulations in an easy and reliable way with the FDS code together with the experimental data measured during the large scale fire tests. This methodology is subdivided into two individual common procedures to cover both local and global effects within the time series analyzed. Additionally, an informative way of representing the results has been developed. This methodology has been successfully applied to compare different physical quantities of the aforementioned OECDPRISME experiment.

The present paper summarises these tasks and presents the developed methodology EMVANEMED as well as the results achieved by applying it to the OECDPRISME-DOOR test PRS_DI_D3.