Simulating the Swissair flight 111 in-flight fire using the CFD fire simulation software SMARTFIRE

At 8.18pm on 2 September 1998, Swissair Flight 111 (SR 111), took off from New York’s JFK airport bound for Geneva, Switzerland. Tragically, the MD-11 aircraft never arrived. According to the crash investigation report, published on 27 March 2003, electrical arcing in the ceiling void cabling was the most likely cause of the fire that brought down the aircraft. No one on board was aware of the disaster unfolding in the ceiling of the aircraft and, when a strange odour entered the cockpit, the pilots thought it was a problem with the air-conditioning system. Twenty minutes later, Swissair Flight 111 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean five nautical miles southwest of Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, with the loss of all 229 lives on board. In this paper, the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis of the in-flight fire that brought down SR 111 is described. Reconstruction of the wreckage disclosed that the fire pattern was extensive and complex in nature. The fire damage created significant challenges to identify the origin of the fire and to appropriately explain the heat damage observed. The SMARTFIRE CFD software was used to predict the “possible” behaviour of airflow as well as the spread of fire and smoke within SR 111. The main aims of the CFD analysis were to develop a better understanding of the possible effects, or lack thereof, of numerous variables relating to the in-flight fire. Possible fire and smoke spread scenarios were studied to see what the associated outcomes would be. This assisted investigators at Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada, Fire & Explosion Group in assessing fire dynamics for cause and origin determination.

Issues in delivering multimedia content to mobile devices

The scalability of a computer system is its response to growth. It is also depended on its hardware, its operating system and the applications it is running. Most distributed systems technology today still depends on bus-based shared memory which do not scale well, and systems based on the grid or hypercube scheme requires significantly less connections than a full inter-connection that would exhibit a quadratic growth rate. The rapid convergence of mobile communication, digital broadcasting and network infrastructures calls for rich multimedia content that is adaptive and responsive to the needs of individuals, businesses and the public organisations. This paper will discuss the emergence of mobile Multimedia systems and provides an overview of the issues regarding design and delivery of multimedia content to mobile devices.

A reconfigurable component model using reflection

Providing a method of transparent communication and interoperation between distributed software is a requirement for many organisations and several standard and non-standard infrastructures exist for this purpose. Component models do more than just provide a plumbing mechanism for distributed applications, they provide a more controlled interoperation between components. There are very few component models however that have support for advanced dynamic reconfigurability. This paper describes a component model which provides controlled and constrained transparent communication and inter-operation between components in the form of a hierarchical component model. At the same time, the model contains support for advanced run-time reconfigurability of components. The process and benefits of designing a system using the presented model are discussed. A way in which reflective techniques and component frameworks can work together to produce dynamic adaptable systems is explained.

The vague, the viral, the parasitic: Piranesi's metropolis

In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition. In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries - in the 18th century as well as in the 21st -in favour of an architecture of change.