Developing probabilistic design fires for performance-based fire safety engineering

Research is ongoing in New Zealand to develop a new risk-informed fire safety design tool called B-RISK that is a combination of deterministic and probabilistic calculation functionality. The purpose of the tool is so that users can examine the risk and uncertainty that is part of modeling building fires in a rational and systematic fashion. A specific module in B-RISK that generates design fire inputs for iterative B-RISK simulations is described in the paper, and statistical distributions for the fire growth rate and peak heat release rate are developed for a residential-scale building occupancy. The use of this statistical data within B-RISK is also demonstrated and comparisons drawn with new building code compliance provisions that have recently come into effect in New Zealand. (C) 2013 International Association for Fire Safety Science. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Asian-Oceania Association of Fire Science and Technology