Getting started with fire consulting
 

Hi All,

Was wondering if I could get a more experienced engineers advice here. I'm looking to extend our offerings into fire simulations and want to know what is required to offer this sort of thing for my company.

Background for context: UK based but often international projects. Been working in industry for roughly ten years. My main field applications revolve around heat transfer cfd, mostly producing solid/fluid conjugate and pure fluid studies with different turbulence models. I have experience with large parallel and have done studies that can take a couple of weeks for transient analysis. I know a few programming languages and can write custom boundary conditions with parallel decomposition and synchronisation in mind.

I have done fire adjacent study before, looking at the products of diesel engine exhaust plumes externally to see how the temperature and CO concentrations turn out.

As a company we'd like to take this above style offering further and we get quite a few requests for simulation + validation of smoke detector and sprinkler positions. I'm not sure how to get started here though.

Given that lives are more explicitly involved in this type of study I'm assuming I can't just do them without a certification, or maybe I can and just need to have the work verified by a professional external to the company? I have done a bit of simulation with FDS and I'm confident I can set models up, but I would like some training if possible so that I'm confident in all of the modelling aspects. If it's long training I could do it part time.

Thanks for reaching the end if you did!!

More details
 

If you want to give fire drills for your business, you might need to think about the following:
Specialized Software: You might want to buy or make software that is made to run fire scenarios. This could mean buying rights for already-existing software or making training tools that are specific to your company's needs.
Expertise in Fire Dynamics: You might want to hire or work with experts in safety engineering and fire dynamics who can give you useful advice and make sure your models are accurate and reliable.