Integrated fire and evacuation in maritime environments

When designing a new passenger ship or modifying an existing design, how do we ensure that the proposed design and crew emergency procedures are safe from an evacuation resulting from fire or other incident? In the wake of major maritime disasters such as the Scandinavian Star, Herald of Free Enterprise, Estonia and in light of the growth in the numbers of high density high-speed ferries and large capacity cruise ships, issues concerning the evacuation of passengers and crew at sea are receiving renewed interest. Fire and evacuation models with features such as the ability to realistically simulate the spread of fire and fire suppression systems and the human response to fire sas well as the capability to model human performance in heeled orientations linked to a virtual reality environment that produces realistic visualisations of modelled scenarios are now available and can be used to aid the engineer in assessing ship design and procedures. This paper describes the maritmeEXODUS ship evacuation and the SMARTFIRE fire simulation model and provides an example application demonstrating the use of the models in performing fire and evacuation analysis for a large passenger ship partially based on the requirements of MSC circular 1033. The fire simulations include the action of a water mist system.

Multi-physics modelling - A vital component of virtual manufacturing

One of the core tasks of the virtual-manufacturing environment is to characterise the transformation of the state of material during each of the unit processes. This transformation in shape, material properties, etc. can only be reliably achieved through the use of models in a simulation context. Unfortunately, many manufacturing processes involve the material being treated in both the liquid and solid state, the trans-formation of which may be achieved by heat transfer and/or electro-magnetic fields. The computational modelling of such processes, involving the interactions amongst various interacting phenomena, is a consider-able challenge. However, it must be addressed effectively if Virtual Manufacturing Environments are to become a reality! This contribution focuses upon one attempt to develop such a multi-physics computational toolkit. The approach uses a single discretisation procedure and provides for direct interaction amongst the component phenomena. The need to exploit parallel high performance hardware is addressed so that simulation elapsed times can be brought within the realms of practicality. Examples of Multiphysics modelling in relation to shape casting, and solder joint formation reinforce the motivation for this work.