Saturday, September 20, 2008

Subway Fires & Upfront CFD

It never ceases to amaze me how people use Upfront CFD to solve their problems. Recently, one of the guys on our team, Ryan Abel, has been working on a fair amount of HVAC problems. Check out the image of a subway fire. The image shows the smoke as it is exiting the subway car while at a station stop.

It is really fun to engage with folks that completely appreciate looking at images similar to the one above. Often, this particular audience, are architectural firms. They don't have any formal CFD training and really don't have much experience in modeling the complex physics. But, they have a need to understand from a design perspective what is going on during various situations. What happens when the doors are open? What happens when the exhaust fans are turned on? How long does it take to evacuate the smoke from the space? What is the "visisibility" in the space during a fire?

Sounds familiar..."what if?" Good old "what if". It is one of the fundamental principles of Upfront CFD. It is a blast to work with these guys. Tons of excitement, lots of curiosity, lots and lots of questions. Makes our job really fun to engage with people super excited about the technology!

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