SOFIE

Simulation of Fires in Enclosures

Introduction

The use of field models to simulate fires plays an increasingly important role in the assessment of widely differing hazard scenarios and post accident investigations. To date they have been widely applied for determining smoke movement in buildings and have proved particularly successful. However, progress in some other important aspects of fire prediction has proved less rapid, in particular that in relation to flame spread and fire growth.

A field modelling program developed within, and accessible to, the fire science community should therefore be able to provide both the stimulus and a unifying framework for the further challenging physical and chemical model development required.

On this premise, the development of SOFIE, under the umbrella of a Consortium including a number of European fire research laboratories, Technical Research Centre of Finland, Swedish National Testing and Research Institute, Fire Research Station, CSTB, Lund University, Health & Safety Laboratory, Home Office Fire Safety Engineering Group, was initiated at Cranfield University.

The SOFIE project has now come to a conclusion. The code is no longer being further developed though is still maintained for bug fixes and continues to be used as a research platform and for teaching purposes.

Executable Distribution Download

An executable version for Windows 2000/XP is freely available for download, see below. If you would like access to the source code please contact me directly.

SOFIE is supplied as a zip file with all necessary files and documentation. This version has been compiled with Intell Visual Fortran and supports multi-core machines. The manual is available separately as a single pdf file. For visualisation MAYAVI is freely available and is quite powerful (output the data from SOFIE in ‘VTK’ or 'Plot3d' format), download from mayavi.sourceforge.net. The additional data files are only required if the laminar flamelet combustion and/or soot model is to be employed. Basic physical data is included with the SOFIE executable distribution. Executables for Linux are available on request.