BIM Based Simulation Of Fire And Smoke Spread In Timber Buildings .

Wood can perform exceptionally towards fire resistance when used properly in building design even though wood itself is combustible. Because of the combustibility of wood, there are still uncertainties and misconceptions associated with its use as a construction material. One of the ways to clear uncertainties and increase stakeholders’ confidence in the use of timber and wood-based composite building elements in construction is through experimental research. Advanced computer technology has made available several computational techniques in the field of building design. Two of these techniques which are gaining popularity are Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). Though these techniques have proofed to be efficient, fast and have long term cost efficiency, its integration needs further exploration.The purpose of this study is to simulate the spread of fire/smoke based on information stored in a BIM model. The underlying goal is to validate the information stored in a BIM model and demonstrate how this information can be used in building physics simulations. This study has a three-step approach. The first step was to extract a section of an already developed BIM model of the Innorenew CoE building complex in Izola, Slovenia. The next step was to export the extracted model and its thermal properties to a CFD software for the simulation. Pyrosim, a Graphic User Interface for Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) and Smokeview is used. The third step was to perform the simulation and analyze the results.The limitation was the inability of Pyrosim to read the thermal properties from the BIM model. This limitation was overcome by developing a Dynamo script that extracts the thermal properties from the BIM model and exports it into Pyrosim. For better integration, further work is needed to enable Pyrosim to read the thermal properties from Revit. Also, a plugin can be developed for Revit to streamline the integration workflow of Revit-FDS/Smokeview and Pyrosim