Simulating accidental fires and explosions

The Utah C-SAFE project is a highly multidisciplinary effort to build an integrated, large scale, high performance simulation framework to simulate accidental fires and explosions involving hydrocarbons, structures, containers, and high-energy materials. C-SAFE will provide a scalable, high performance, problem solving environment (PSE) in which fundamental chemistry and engineering physics are fully coupled with nonlinear solvers, optimization, computational steering, visualization, and experimental data verification. The availability of simulations using this system will help to better evaluate the risks and safety issues associated with fires and explosions. As the article discusses, we validate and document the five-year product, termed Uintah 5.0, for practical application to accidents involving both hydrocarbon and energetic materials.