Uncertainty management for the probabilistic simulation of the thermal resistance of fire barriers

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School of Engineering | Doctoral thesis (article-based) | Defence date: 2020-11-26
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Date

2020

Department

Rakennustekniikan laitos
Department of Civil Engineering

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Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

70 + app. 88

Series

Aalto University publication series DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS, 186/2020

Abstract

Due to the inadequate availability of engineering tools, the conventional test-based method, currently, regulates the design of fire barriers. This thesis aims to provide a supporting simulation-based approach. The objective is to develop numerical models and a simulation framework for the prediction of fire barrier thermal resistance under uncertain fire load and material conditions. The main challenges are the complexity of the thermal behaviour of fibrous barriers to be simulated, the high computational cost of the stochastic simulations accounting for the input uncertainties, and the propagation of model uncertainty to the output distribution. To predict the thermal behaviour of the stone wool, I present a multiphysics model of a fibrous layer, capable of tracking the heat transfer, chemical decomposition and oxygen transfer. As an alternative, I use heat conduction-based model with reaction kinetics coupled to the stone wool's organic content. The results show that the exothermic oxidation of the stone wool's organic matter is responsible for the observed peaks in the cold-side surface temperatures, but the amount of released energy and the height of these temperature peaks are limited by the unavailability of oxygen in stone wools with high organic content. To reduce the computational burden of the probabilistic fire barrier resistance evaluation, I present the use of the Response Surface Method (RSM) and Gaussian Process (GP) regression. The results show that the simple polynomial-based RSM approximation fails when the heat transfer is affected by exothermic reactions. Fortunately, this is in contrast with GP, where the kernel combination made the approximation possible even for such a case. Alongside, I studied the propagation of modelling uncertainty to the predicted output distributions using various examples: compartment fire experiment, stone wool thermal resistance test, a chain of two models, and meta-model based analysis. I propose a simple method of eliminating the propagated modelling uncertainty from the stochastically simulated output distribution. The results show that the proposed method effectively corrects the outputs if the uncertainty correction metric well represents the model uncertainty of the investigated stochastic analysis scenario. The illustrated examples mostly use normal or uniform input distributions, but the method is not bound to any distribution type.

Description

Defence: 26.11.2020 12:00 – 16:00 Online https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63613284138

Supervising professor

Hostikka, Simo, Assoc. Prof., Aalto University, Department of Civil Engineering, Finland

Keywords

fire barriers, uncertainty propagation, heat transfer

Other note

Parts

  • [Publication 1]: Paudel, D. and Hostikka, S., 2019. Propagation of modelling uncertainty in stochastic heat-transfer simulation using a chain of deterministic models. International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification, 9(1), pp.1-14.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201905062783
    DOI: 10.1615/Int.J.UncertaintyQuantification.2018027275 View at publisher
  • [Publication 2]: Paudel, D. and Hostikka, S., 2019. Propagation of model uncertainty in the stochastic simulations of a compartment fire. Fire Technology, 55(6), pp.2027-2054.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201905062860
    DOI: 10.1007/s10694-019-00841-9 View at publisher
  • [Publication 3]: Paudel, D., Rinta-Paavola, A., Mattila, HP., and Hostikka, S., 2020. Multiphysics modelling of stone wool fire resistance. Fire Technology, pp.1-30.
    DOI: 10.1007/s10694-020-01050-5 View at publisher
  • [Publication 4]: Paudel, D., and Hostikka, S., 2020. Meta-model based stochastic simulation of fire barrier cold-side temperature. Fire Safety Journal, pp.1-12.
    Full text in Acris/Aaltodoc: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202008214834
    DOI: 10.1016/j.firesaf.2020.103175 View at publisher

Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-64-0136-2

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[diss] Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu / ENG