Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), which is a widely used Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tool for the simulation of fire phenomena. It is developed as an open-source project led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland is responsible for the development of the thermal radiation and condensed-phase heat transfer and pyrolysis modules of FDS.
ABAQUS and ANSYS, which are both general purpose Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software. They offer tools for modelling structures under simultaneous thermal and mechanical loads. ABAQUS and ANSYS are commercial products of Dassault Systèmes and Ansys Inc. respectively.
In the simulation framework, FDS is used to model the fire environment and the heat exposure to relevant structures, while ABAQUS is used for their thermal and mechanical response. Thermal exposure to surfaces is extracted from the fire dynamics simulation and used as a time-dependent boundary condition in the subsequent thermal-mechanical analysis. The sequential coupling scheme is illustrated in Figure .
